Bryce furry/velvety materials ... help needed please!
launok
Posts: 782
Hi there,
Yesterday I have tried to check and see if a shader preset will export with rest of materials from out of DazStudio 4.6 to Bryce 7.1 and unfortunately it didn't work. Most of the DS materials does transfer to Bryce but not a shader as in the fur case. The thing is with some shaders in DS, that it only shows up on rendering in DS itself and not before render process. I got a beautiful fur shader preset from RedEyeCat which works in DS 4.6 quite well and I am pleased with that part. But the thing is I don't use DS for my final renders but prefer Bryce as I am quite used to this program.
I have seen a few furs for Bryce at ShareCG but it's more related to animal prints with little variety. I want to add just a normal colored fur and velvet effect to clothing, i.e. fur jacket/sweater, etc. or fur materials to other objects such as bedding, curtains, carpets or whatever.
Fur effects: short to long fur hair.
Are there any Bryce 7.1 tutorials on creating a fur and velvet effect material?
Thank you for any help!
Regards,
Laura
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Comments
Hi launok!
I don't know a tutorial about creating a fur/velvet effect in bryce but Rashad have work on a material about this.
You can simply download it for free to use at Sharecg.com.
Here's the link above : http://www.sharecg.com/v/45478/
Thanks, I will go and give it a try! :) smile
Rashad's velvet material is great. David Brinnen has also been working on a different way of making velvet/satin, but it's quite involved. Maybe he'll be along sometime to link to the videos he's made about his extreme Deep Texture Editor experiments.
Fur is another tricky one as the objects it's usually applied to are mesh objects therefore displacement doesn't work in the expected way (if it works at all without crashing Bryce).
The best you'd be able to do would be to use an extreme bump.
Remember that in the Mat Lab, you can set bump to 999 using the numerical input box, whereas it will only go up to 100 if you use the slider.
Also try the different bump map modes in the material options as "enhanced bump" is most likely not the default option for older preset materials.
Thank you for your advice! With my low-ram (1gb) computer, Bryce tends to crash even when I go over a certain number of objects in the scene and I have then to make separate scenes of the same, cut out some objects, and re-render separately ... and on the final render image paste all the bits and pieces back exactly where it should be in order to complete a full scene - it looses then some quality but this is just for personal use as I can't sell that to others!! LOL Not the best practice of doing things, but I have no other option to prevent losing them all when Bryce crashes!! I use PaintShopPro for the cutting/pasting on the various images. So, if you talk about Bryce and Fur and it could maybe crash Bryce, mine is then definitely standing 1st in the row that it will happen!! Otherwise I must use, what they call 'Postwork', and use PSP's fur brush where needed! But to keep the whole render/image in totally 3D is off course the better way in my mind!
Perhaps Davids instructions in his Frost tutorial could be adjusted somehow.
The materials will only work as velvet when they are lit by a Dome Light with special settings. There is a tutorial that must be used along with this material. I will briefly cover the content of the tutorial here for anyone who is interested. The Dome Light must be set up as follows:
1. Create a Dome Light
2. In the Light Lab do the following:
A. Diffuse Intensity = 0
B. Specular Intensity = -400
C. Fall-Off = None
D. Cast Shadows = Enabled
E. Shadow Intensity = 100%
F, On the left hand side of the Light Lab there are sliders that control the Quality, Bias and Randomness of the way the virtual radials are handled by this single light source. Below the Randomness slider there is a button called "Distant." Enable this button. The "Distant" option enlarges the Dome light to an infinite size like an IBL.
3. Exit the Light Lab. We will return to the Lab in a moment.
4. Create a Sphere.
5. Rename the Sphere as "Fabric."
6. Apply the Velvet Material in the link above to the Fabric sphere.
7. Enter the Light Lab. On the bottom right there is an Influence dialogue, Select "Include."
8. A drop down list will display, you want to select Fabric from the list. Exit the Light Lab.
You will now notice the sphere takes on a velvety look. Now, there are a couple of things to keep in mind...
1. You have used the Include feature, such that the only objects receiving the negative specular are those you select via the drop down menu. For this reason, any polygonal object you want to respond to the negative specular dome needs to be named "Fabric." So if your character is wearing various clothing items just name them all "Fabric" and they will respond as expected to the light.. In fact ,even if the object is embedded within a group, if you change the name of a mesh to Fabric it will begin to respond as velvet. If you have 100 objects all with the name Fabric, they will all respond as expected.
2. When you look closely at the material lab settings for this effect you will notice there is a very low specular setting. This is because the specular coming from the lighting is negative, which means it subtracts brightness from the diffuse color instead of adding to it in the way a positive specular would. Too much specular and your texture will end up looking black.
Negative lights are a bit of magic in so many ways. The velvet trick works as it does here because in theory the negative specular will cast "positive shadows" which appear as velvety highlights. You will also notice there is a noise added to the bump. The noise is essential for the look of velvet, but if you want a more satin look you will turn down or completely turn off the bump.
Best of luck. Report back if you have any problems.
Dear Rashad,
Thank you for your explanation regarding velvet materials in Bryce. I will give this a try!
Laura
Rashad will this also work with things like crushed velvet or Devore velvet?
There's nothing wrong with a bit of layering in your Bryce renders... I use it quite a lot (mostly with volumetric clouds) and take a look at the magnificent results Micheal Frank achieves.
There should be no need to "cut" in external photo editing apps though. You can render an alpha mask in Bryce as a separate file and then import that into the alpha channel in your photo editor. Then you can more simply create a 2D square in Bryce and re-import your pre-rendered picture, placed in the exact place along with the alpha channel set so it's even cut out for you. You then end up with what are effectively multi layers of 2D pictures but all rendered in Bryce and the final render of all the composite layers also done in one go directly from Bryce.
If you're going to work that way, plenty of planning is required though as camera position, lighting etc. will have to remain the same throughout so that all the layers are consistent in look.
Yeah, I can do that. Bryce Made Easy - Velvet bump recipe - by David Brinnen
Edit.
Pros. Renders quickly.
Cons. Requires a bit of faffing in the DTE and needs to be applied to a fairly complex (high density) mesh object. Will not work well with low quality/low poly mesh objects.
I did this a while ago, following some of the suggestions of the good folks that hang out here.
Yes indeed. In fact it is possible to make storybook grass as well with this effect. There are ways to super boost the effect to unnatural but cool looking levels. What you will also find is that objects with this material will affect one another. Two adjacent velvet objects will cast positive shadows onto one another multiplying the velvet effect in some areas in a cool but not truly accurate way. This Dome Light trick gets us close, but not fully there. Still it is one of the coolest effects I have in my arsenal. The example uploaded by Rareth was made with the velvet tutorial above. This lends itself well to crushed velvet, just play with the bump settings.
David's method looks great as well. What I like about it is that it doesn't rely on lights as such to produce the effect but rather the material does it alone. Fewer lights usually means faster rendering which is always a plus. To me David's example looks a lot like a crushed velvet already, or at least a rather heavy satin. My only concern is that David's approach might require a fixed camera perspective, which was the case previously but maybe he's solved that, I'm not sure as I haven't caught up on the latest videos. My approach can be viewed from any angle without issue..but because it requires light domes there can be banding issues so neither approach is free from considerations. It is good to see there is more than one way of doing this. I've not had the opportunity to test out David's velvet so I cannot say which approach gives the most accurate result. But in this case I dont think accuracy is really important, just the overall impression needs to be in the ball park. You can't go wrong either way.
Yes indeed. In fact it is possible to make storybook grass as well with this effect. There are ways to super boost the effect to unnatural but cool looking levels. What you will also find is that objects with this material will affect one another. Two adjacent velvet objects will cast positive shadows onto one another multiplying the velvet effect in some areas in a cool but not truly accurate way. This Dome Light trick gets us close, but not fully there. Still it is one of the coolest effects I have in my arsenal. The example uploaded by Rareth was made with the velvet tutorial above. This lends itself well to crushed velvet, just play with the bump settings.
David's method looks great as well. What I like about it is that it doesn't rely on lights as such to produce the effect but rather the material does it alone. Fewer lights usually means faster rendering which is always a plus. To me David's example looks a lot like a crushed velvet already, or at least a rather heavy satin. My only concern is that David's approach might require a fixed camera perspective, which was the case previously but maybe he's solved that, I'm not sure as I haven't caught up on the latest videos. My approach can be viewed from any angle without issue..but because it requires light domes there can be banding issues so neither approach is free from considerations. It is good to see there is more than one way of doing this. I've not had the opportunity to test out David's velvet so I cannot say which approach gives the most accurate result. But in this case I dont think accuracy is really important, just the overall impression needs to be in the ball park. You can't go wrong either way.
The whole negative light trick is awesome when you get it right, that and the fact you can set it to only affect certain items in the scene and not others makes for a very powerful too.
Thank you for your advice and help. I am only learning and every bit of help is very much appreciated by all of you people from here!!
Laura