Materials Share

**dreamz** · 08-04-10

Still no success for me opening the POVRay zip. Keep being told there's nothing to extract. Clearly I'm just not meant to have these materials. Lol.

Thanks Teria, I'm learning new stuff every day. Maybe a textures sharing thread would be useful too.

**ancomic** · 08-06-10

default materials 41...
Edited the 00default.png file.

**dreamz** · 08-06-10

Thank yp

**Taron** · 08-06-10

Not sure, if you've noticed it, yet, but you can create limitless materials with my little MaCrea App, which I'm currently still developing. It's great fun already and you can do everything from wild translucent materials to toon shaded stuff with outlines and such.
MaCrea Thread

...all that just on a side note, of course.

**dreamz** · 08-06-10

Yep, it's been sitting on my desktop for a few days now - I opened it, had a play around, and I just didn't understand it. Haven't had the time since to look for a tutorial. Can you point me in the right direction?

**Taron** · 08-06-10

Ugh, that's curious. Hmmm, well, let's first start with the original motivation:

- Create materials with different substances but under the same lighting for use in paint mode.

In that case it's all about setting up one lighting and than exporting materials with various specularity and subsurface extension levels. That way you can paint on different substances later in paint mode.

You can go as far as backlit or scattered materials with proper adjustment of the lights and substance.

- What to do:

Right off the bet you can move the lights around in 3d space when you drag them around within the viewport. Leftclick moves the light along X and Y, while middle click moves them down Z into and out of the screen.

Right mouseclick up/down controls the brightness of your lightsource. Hold down CTRL while doing so and you adjust specularity. Hold down SHIFT and you'll adjust subsurface extension.

If you have more than one lightsource you can hold down "A" while doing all of the above and it will modify all of the lightsources.

EXPORT and you'll get a file requester that allows you to save out the PNG of what's in the viewport. That's your material sphere.

- Fun with colors:
The Color Pallet is designed to work with Sculptris Paint logic. Inside of Paint you will find out that the materials 50% gray is actually its diffuse white. Everything about it is a reflective component such as highlights or reflections.
Therefore I've designed the pallet inside MaCrea to allow you to pick a color and then in the lowerbar fade it towards 50% gray. Eventually I might offer a little helper modus in which you can view and adjust such diffuse components independent from speculars. I'll have to think of an elegant way of doing so.

Anyway, above the pallet you can chose what subject's color you want to adjust. Lightsource, Surface or Subsurface. Keep an eye on what you've selected, because it could sometimes happen that you forget as you work with multiple lights and as opposed to picking a new color for the light, you pick it for subsurface and...eh...there's no undo, yet. No big deal, really, but it could be annoying.

- Mysterious buttons:
[i] ...stands for independent settings per lightsource. I kept it cryptic like that, because it doesn't really make any sense. It allows you to chose independent specularities for each light as well as subsurface extensions and so forth, which should really just be the materials fixed traits and not something that could change from light to light. However, you can do very nice effects with ignoring all logic and just designing things visually. I've just today made a curious fake eyeball with iris that is plenty of fun to use within Sculptris.
[^] These values adjust the parameters curvature, but just adjust it and you shall sort of see what's happening. I really hope you don't mind experimenting a little bit. It should all be fairly observable and nothing that makes your computer explode.

- Interface control style:
Currently the interface has some buttons for triggers and toggles as well as plenty of value gadgets. I'm fairly proud of those, as you can hover with your mouse over the digit you'd want to adjust and either scrub the value up by those increments or use the mousewheel to adjust them linearly. I personally have never seen such a quick method to adjust values without having to type the numbers. And I'm too lazy and scared to write a typing solution, hehe, but that's sharing a bit much, I guess. A few flaws are still in there with the float gadgets, if I did not limit them ([specularity ][* ]) it's a bit flawed but still works. That booster[*] allows you to go negative with your specularity as well as boost very low glossiness for some nice effects, too. I should've called it glossiness in the first place, but hmmm... I'll do that later.

- F1
Although it's still very crude, hit F1 to get some info on the shortcuts.

I'll make a video, but in the meantime I hope at least some of you can have some fun with MaCrea, too.

I keep updating it, so check back in frequently, if you care/dare?!

**dreamz** · 08-06-10

The reason I couldn't understand MaCrea is probably due to graphics card inadequacy - I have already had some problems in Sculptris. When I run MaCrea I'm greeted with a grey central screen on which nothing appears and nothing I do changes that.

I've just looked on the internet and it seems it's the Radeon problem again.

**Taron** · 08-07-10

AH, well, you need a gfxcard that runs openGL 2.0 or higher. ATi is often a pain as it's very strict about GLSL shaders. Nvidia is much more forgiving. However, my latest version should run fine on ATi cards, too, if they are young enough to handle GLSL in the first place, of course.

I'm sorry and glad at the same time, haha...

...because you scared me quite a bit there that it could be not understandable.

Here's what it should look like (with my little eye experiment from yestereday)

Or a quick example such as this...

And one more example of doing a toon shader...

Anyway...I'll make a few clips later, but first I want to see if I can finish up another release today.