The main goal for this material is to achieve the iridescent, multi-colored swirl pattern that is so often visible in soap bubbles. The bubbles can have many different looks: some patterns are very intense and colorful, while some are less so. In this tutorial, we are trying to achieve something in the middle. The basic material is very similar to…
This type of leather is a bit peculiar, in that it lacks the most distinct property of other leather types: reflections. In a sense, it is closer to fabric-type materials than it is to shiny leather. As you would with fabrics, use a Falloff map in the Diffuse slot. The Falloff curve is left as is, while the second Falloff…
Take the completed oiled leather material and modify it to create a distressed leather shader. This is our starting point: Here is a reference photo to use as a rough guide: As you can see, the Diffuse color has a lot more variation to it than our texture. Replace the procedurally mixed setup in the Diffuse slot with a single…
Leather materials can have hundreds of different variations, so it's impossible to cover them all. There are, however, some common elements that are found in most kinds of leather: rich Diffuse color, blurry Reflections, and the characteristic Bump pattern which shows off the grain of the leather. Basic 'modern' leather does not have much color variation. In fact, the material…
Fur is similar to hair, with a couple of exceptions. Sometimes, the animal doesn't have all the hair strands in the same color. You can either use a texture with small noise with different colors in it, or set up a procedural texture as in the example below. This map mixes a couple of noise maps to create a 4-color…
Human hair is a simple material. Even so, there are a few key things to keep in mind. The Diffuse color should always be black for clean hair and fur. Leave it at the default setting. The color will be defined differently. Primary specular should be a desaturated gray, usually dark, or a bit lighter for oily hair. You can…
Damask fabric is a pattern of silk-on-velvet or velvet-on-silk. The easiest way to make something like this is by using VrayBlend material. Just assign silk to the base material slot and velvet to the coat material slot and use a high contrast b&w mask in the blend amount slot (no gray shades in this one). Here's the velvet: Here's the…
Sometimes, silk has a pattern made by threads going in different directions. This causes the light to be reflected differently in those areas. We can try to replicate this effect by mixing together 2 different Falloff maps in the Reflect slot. Just change the map type to Mix and keep the old Falloff as the sub-map. Copy the Falloff map…
Silk fabrics need some special shader setups to look realistic. Since these effects are caused by thousands of fibers reflecting the light in different ways, it's not easy to replicate the look exactly, but we can get close. The main characteristic of silk is that it has a beautiful shine. The highlights appear only at specific angles, mostly on the…
Velvet fabrics need some special shader setups to look realistic. Since these effects are caused by thousands of fibers reflecting the light in different ways, it's not easy to replicate the look exactly, but we can get close. Take a look at a reference image for basic velvet, to see what we are trying to achieve. The main feature of…
