[Reiner]

My little test project has shown me that the Material Library VX addon lacks of some standard materials. A leaf material was one of it.

That’s where we need your help. We need more materials that we can include into the Material Library VX addon. So when you know a useful material that should be included, everything is welcome

[Reiner]

So what are the most common shaders? Let’s collect what we need.

Wood

Leaf shader

Metal in different flavours

Glass

Plastic in variations

Wall ( cement, wallpaper, etc )

Bricks

Concrete

Fur

Skin

Leather

Fabric

Diffuse

Diffuse with Texture

Diffuse with Texture and Normalmap

Diffuse with Texture, Normalmap and displacement

 

 

[davis]

• Rock
• Hair
• Sand
• Water
• Woodfloor
• Marble

… to be continued. ^^

[Reiner]

Let it coming. Best with attached material

Quite a few are of course already in the libary. Glass for example. But as told, a few standard things are simply missing. And the addon needs imho a better categorizing and naming of the materials too.

[davis]

Let’s make a complete list first. I am not sure how up to date the existing materials in the library are? With the introduction of the principled shader some of them can maybe be simplified.

Best for the materials would be if they only used procedual textures, where possible I guess?

[Reiner]

Procedural doesn’t make sense where you need real textures. But we will see. First let’s make the list. Then let’s have a look what exists in the library already. And then let’s have a look to fill the gaps. And to throw out what is not needed.

We can of course also have a look if we can update the existing materials to Principled where possible and useful.

[NigeC]

I have a couple of metal normal and clipping maps for punched stainless or nurled metal:

 

[Reiner]

Everything is welcome

We just shouldn’t completely overdo. But that’s a thing for later. First let’s collect what we can get.

[NigeC]

a lot of mine are multi layer Thea mats so I’d need to figure out how to replicate it in Cycles ..

 

[davis]

Here is what I came up with so far. – Not a complete list yet and maybe not all of the materials are 100% essential?

Just copy/paste the list and add materials into the matching category in the next posts.

Stones

• Brick (New)

• Brick (Old)

• Concrete (Smooth)

• Concrete (Weathered)

• Marble Carrara (White)

• Granite (Black)

• Rock

 

[DONE]  Paint / Coating (each in multiple colors: White, Black, Grey, Red, Blue, Yellow, …)  

• Highgloss Paint

• Semigloss Paint

• Matte Paint

• Metallic Paint

• Powdercoating (Glossy)

• Powdercoating (Rough)

• Plaster

 

Plastics (each in multiple colors: White, Black, Grey, Red, Blue, Yellow, …)

• ABS (High Gloss)

• ABS (Textured)

• Polycarbonate (Transparent / Tinted)

• Rubber

• Wax

 

Organic

• Hair

• Fur

• Skin

• Leaf Shader

• Grass Shader

• Bark Shader

 

Ground

• Soil

• Lawn

• Pebbles

• Sand

 

Fabric & Leather (each in various colors and a basic pattern)

• Cotton (Rough)

• Silk (Smooth)

• Wool (knitted)

• Velvet

• Leather

 

Paper

• Paper White

• Papyrus

• Wallpaper

 

[DONE] Glass

• Glass Clear

• Glass Frosted

• Glass Tinted

 

[DONE] Metal

• Steel Polished

• Steel Brushed

• Aluminium

• Aluminium Anodized (Colors)

• Copper Polished

• Copper Oxidized

• Brass

• Gold

• Bronce

• Stretch Metal

• Chequerplate Aluminium

 

[DONE] Ceramic (each in multiple colors: White, Black, Grey, Red, Blue, Yellow, …)

• Ceramic Glossy

• Ceramic Tiles

 

[DONE] Liquids

• Water Clear

• Water Muddy

• Coffee

• Wine

• Orange Juice

• Blood

 

Wood (all in highgloss, semigloss, raw and worn variations)

• Walnut

• Cherry

• Oak

• Mahogany

• Rosewood

• Bamboo Veneer

[Reiner]

Great list

With the wood, do you mean the bark or the wood inside?

EDIT, i would of course love to include as much materials as possible. But a single useful wood texture can easily eat up 50 mb and more. So that’s most probably most of the textures out. I don’t want to blow up the Bforartists download to a few gigabytes ^^

[davis]

Good point, I added the bark shader to the “organic” category.

The download size is of course something to keep an eye on. Despite not having to uv unwrap the objects, keeping it mostly procedual textures also make sense for that. – If the library grows too big, it could always be an additional download for an extended library of course.

What should be included in the BfA download could be “the ESSENTIAL library” (which is also a great name for it.^^) – Maybe it is enough to just include some placeholder textures, if it is treated more like a toolkit of presets, that the user plug in their their own textures. – In that regard one wood material (in some variations, like glossy, matte, raw) would be enough, the rest relys on the creativity of the artist to fill in the textures as needed.

Edit: The “ESSENTIAL” and the “EXTENDED” library could be good names for these features.

[Reiner]

Yeah. No problem to include some essential textures for demonstration purpose. It’s just we cannot include several hundrets mb of image material ^^

[Reiner]

Okay, let’s make nails with heads, and collect what already exists versus what we want to add.

Current main categories in the addon:

Blender Internal,

Cycles Templates

Cycles Materials

V_Ray

Blender Internal will vanish with 2.8, so we shouldn’t even bother to change anything here. V-Ray. Well, it comes with the official Blender version. But V-Ray does not come with Bforartists nor Blender. So no point to keep this materials. That’s already two categories that we could remove from the addon.

I have yet to find out the difference between Cycles Templates and Cycles Materials. The templates are in the end materials too. So i would vote to make the Templates a sub category of the Cycles Materials.

That way we have just sub categories for Cycles. Ledt’s keep Blender Internal as long as we have the 2.7x line, and we have shrinked the main categories from 4 to 2.

You mentioned essentials and extended. So that could split the Cycles materials into two big categories again.

Anyways. We can do this at a later point. First let’s sort the existing Cycles sub categories. That’s the first thing that we need to fix i guess. Proper material categories. I made a few comments already.

Templates – the main category that we want to be a sub category. Should contain more complicated templates. See Essential category below.

Car Paint – Should not be a main category. Where could this fit?

Organic – This one could include stuff like skin, fur and leaf shaders

Glass

Textile – Rename to Fabric and leather

Groups – A single entry with Node groups. This one is a template

Utils – Two entries.This one is a template

Metal

Lights

Ceramic

Plastic

Earth – Could become procedural. Or go into the marble category below.

Wood

All

The categories that we want to add here is so far this: 

Essential – Simple templates with Texture, Normalmap, etc. . The kind of stuff that you usually start with when you make your own setup, and where you again and again spend a dozen clicks at.

Bricks – maybe this one could be part of the wall main group. We don’t need more than two or three bricks examples.

Wall

Rock

Liquids – Water, orange juice, etc.

Marble

Paint

Paper

Ground

More ideas? Suggestions ?

 

 

 

 

[Reiner]

Hm, adding a material from within the addon does not work. It says material added, but the new category stays empty.

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