1 IntroductionFalloff maps are an extremely powerful tool for an artist to have when creating procedural shaders. They are essential when trying to create any realistic shader that is reflective or has color changing properties like chrome, metals, and pearlescent paint. In order to use Falloff maps effectively it is important to understand how the map works. This document will…
It is much easier to start with a photo that has light seams and dark bricks. You can always adjust the colors later, but making a Normal map for the Bump is much easier with a high contrast combo like this. By doing some level, saturation, and manual painting adjustments, the resulting height map looks like this: Below are the…
There are quite a few different types of asphalt and it can look different depending on its age. This shader is for a pretty fresh and dark look. Scatter a bunch of rocks on a plane and render out a zdepth pass. Clip in the whites to make sure the topmost stones make a smooth, flat surface. After that, the…
Clay is a straight-forward material with a basic set of maps. Here is the setup: The interesting part here is the Normal map, which adds the finger indentations and other distrotions to the surface. It is best to sculpt it in Zbrush, on a simple plane ("Brush Wrap" on to make it tileable). Try different sculpts for different results.
This is a rather interesting material. In the real world, pearl is made up from many different transparent layers with different colored reflections. When combined, these layers give the iridescence effect. Let's start with the first layer. We need a light Diffuse color (with slight bluish/beige/pink tint, depending on the type of pearl). The reflections are colored and then blurred…
Porcelain is different from many other stone-type materials, because it has translucency. To achieve this effect, we are going to use VrayFastSSS2 material. First deal with the basic settings like IOR and Specular layer. The reflections are pretty strong and quite sharp, so use a very light color for Reflections and a glossiness value of 0.98. Fresnel IOR is set…
One of the main characteristics of plaster is that it looks flat when compared to other materials. The light and shadow play is not as strong. Microscopic irregularities cause this effect and it can be simulated in Vray by raising the Roughness parameter a little bit (0.25 in this example). The diffuse map is a photo, adjusted so that the…
Let's go back to a single layer material and convert it to a rough granite shader. The main difference here is that the material needs to have lower glossiness and a rough looking Bump map (in this example, we are actually using a Normal map for higher quality results). A bit of color variation in the glossiness is good. And here…
Here is our reference, which we will try to achieve. The Diffuse map is a simple, tileable photo of sand (the example here is a crop). Reflect and Gloss maps are based on a greyscale version of the Diffuse, but with some brighter specks added in. These brighter dots simulate the little quartz grains in sand that sometimes are much more…
This is a very popular way to show off the object's wireframe. Basically, you want to combine the AO and Wireframe shaders together to show both the shape and polygon structure of the model. There are quite a few ways to achieve this, but this is the best approach. Take your AO shader and change the Dirt map to Composite…
