[Reiner]

Thanks for the reminder. Need to make an issue here ^^

[Reiner]

Geez, no hiding of geometry in texture paint mode? How is one supposed to reach inner regions then?

Workaround: duplciate mesh, delete geometry that’s in the way. paint, go back to original mesh, duplicate mesh … -.-

[Reiner]

Textured. Now sculpting and baking. And then the material. Not sure if i should go the PBR way here.

[Reiner]

Hm, setting up erverything correct for baking is still a mystery here and there. Mesh was invisible, and the bake button turned greyed out. Took me a while to find out that it was the invisible mesh. I also ran into the cyclic dependencies trap again with baking the textures. I just can’t imagine of a good way to lead the user in a better way

[Reiner]

Why sculpt when you can displace? ^^

Makes also the normalmap obsolete. Hopefully. I hope my old pc can handle the scene then. We will see.

[Reiner]

And material is also setup. A few tweaks remains. Translucent and SSS eats up the texture when chosen too strong. And the displacement map needs a bit more love. There are regular artifacts. But in general i’m close to what i wanted to achieve

Scene is attached.

Now i need a snail body too …

 

[davis]

Looking good. – You could use your displacement texture with a contrast adjustments on the roughness and specular inputs to make the ridges more reflective than the grooves. Also using the diffuse texture in the specular color slot might make the reflections more realistic by coloring them slightly with the underlaying color.

[Reiner]

Great tips. Could you be so kind to modify the file with the changes? I’m in general still lost with the Cycles nodes ^^

[davis]

Sure, no problem. Find the adjusted material attached. – The trick with the translucent material mixed with the principled shader is not really neccessary. I would simply use SubsurfaceScattering for this, unless you want to make a rendering, where the snailhouse is actually lit completely through from the back? – You could even skip that completely for faster rendering depending on the lighting of the final scene.

A bit of explanation of the nodes

1. The math node is not really neccessary, but I used it for illustration purposes here. The larger the SSS radius, the more area the light shining through the object will affect. – I put a purple light into the shell for testing.
2. I used an RGB Curves node to modify the diffuse texture for the SSS color. By giving it more contrast, dark parts of the shell will appear darker and light parts lighter, when light is shining through the object. The Hue/Saturation after that is used to take the amount of color added by the contrast down a bit.
3. Another RGB Curves node is used to tone down the diffuse map using it for the specular (reflection amount) and specular tint (reflection color) input. You could split this into one RGB curve for each input for better control over reflectivity and color, or use the displacement map for the specular input instead. But it seemed to work out that way, so I kept it simple here.
4. The input to the roughness value runs through a color ramp node. A white value would make the material completely rough, a black value would make a completely clear reflection. That´s why the light/dark values are reversed, so that the higher parts of the displacement will be more reflective. By adjusting the grey values in the color ramp the glossiness can be changed.

I hope that helps? – Curious to see the snail you are going to put in there?

 

[Reiner]

Ah, many thanks for this. I would have never figured this one out by my own 

I dunno how the snail will look. It’s been a while that i made art. And i am usually a game developer. At least i was for many years. Realism and stills isn’t my strong side really. Of course it has to fit to the snail house then. We will see 

[Reiner]

Snailbody modeled. Now unwrapping and texturing. Still not sure if i should again displace or if i should sculpt this time. But i guess i will try the displace way again.

[Reiner]

Ran into several crashes while sculpting with dynatopo. Needs investigation

Ran into several problems with the try to bake textures. One was the almighty cyclic dependencies. Needs investigation.

No vertex color baking in Cycles yet. Bummer!

EDIT, render from vertex color seems to work with a special node setup. Render TO vertex color with an addon.

[Reiner]

Body is done. The material is once more killing me here. But it could be worse. And i will do the fine adjustments in the final scene then*. Important is that all textures are finished.

*I was not able to append the snailhouse. I had to export the mesh, and reimport it in the current scene. That’s why the snailhouse is missing the good material and displacement here. The modifiers are in the way with appending it seems.

[Draise]

I find appending groups is the best way to transfer data, or even the scene.  With a group everything related to the object will come with it in the group. 

:dance:

[Reiner]

You mean i should create a group with just the snailhouse? Worth a try

[Author]

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