Digital Art Zone

I’m a beginner with Carrara Its bit sitting around for ages and I’ve recently started to have a look at it I’m running Carrara 5.

I was wondering whether anyone knows how I could make a good Piano Ivory shader because its a weird material which is white but kinda yellow and smooth like marble but not shiny but I can’t quite get it

It would probably help if you showed us some screen captures of your current attempts in the Shader room.

This is what I have at the moment but as I said I’m new to it and am not quite sure what I am doing :/

wolby2010 - 12 July 2012 02:26 PM

This is what I have at the moment but as I said I’m new to it and am not quite sure what I am doing :/

First thing I see is that you are trying to do this with a single solid colour. You may want to try a subtle colour gradient and mix it up with a fractal noise. Depending on the age of the keys, you might benefit from a slight shininess.

Shaders do tend to take a lot of trial and error to get just right. Your scene lighting will also play a factor too and impact how the shader looks afterward.

Looks pretty good to my eyes thus far though. You’re on the right track!

I’m fiddling with realistic shaders only for some weeks now, but the first question is to ask: how close will your camera be to the keyboard. If it’s something in the background, you’re fine with you’re shader. If one key fills your picture, it will need some tweaking.

I had the background problem with the piano of some DAZ-model: I simply set the color shader to RGB 245-242-232, hightlight to value 30, shininess to 7. That’s enough for something solely living in the background,

On something for the foreground I would start with the same simple background shader, then add some reflection value under 10. Adjust Highlight and Shininess accordind to your surrounding lights. Maybe use some procedural shader in the color channel, because ivory is mostly uniform, but not at all if you take a look closer.

Ah, and subsurface scattering will be essential for realism. It’s not like a pearl, but even a key on a piano has some slight, really slight SSS. How much, will depend, as usually, on the surrounding light.

Sorry; I can not give some simple solution, because every shadesr values depend on the lights, which will hit them. (I’ve learned that the hard way the last weeks )

edit: And what Garstor said.

Thank you very much for your replies I’m gonna try them out and see what works for me. In general I think I will have the piano in the background but its nice to know how to create the right kind of shaders

It definitely takes time to master. Check out some of the models that you can buy from the store—they can sometimes be a source of education.

Most importantly, use these forums. There are plenty of helpful folks here—goodness knows they’ve gotten me out of some mind-wracking issues.

As I get better at Carrara, I’d like to produce some tutorial videos about building shaders. For now, check out Phil Wilkes’ Carrara training at Infinite Skills (you can also purchase through the Daz Store I believe). Phil’s stuff taught me a lot and helped me dive into Carrara headlong.