Need detailed info, how would I setup this PBR in Rhino?

Hi everyone, I’m trying to setup a PBR under the Materials Toolbar. But somethings not right, the PBR comes out very non-metallic, more stone-like than anything. I’d appreciate any help from y’all with this. Trying to load up a PBR from this site, cc0textures.com. It’s the one in the pic below, Metal 002. When I opened up the zip, there’s a set of 5 files under each category (2K or 4K), as well as an odd file (SSM…???) which I believe doesn’t apply to Rhino, maybe Blender idk… Anyways, say for Metal 002, there’s a set of 5 files as follows:
Metal002_2K_Color
Metal002_2K_Displacement
Metal002_2K_Metalness
Metal002_2K_Normal
Metal002_2K_Roughness

As in the Kyle Houchens YT short video on PBR’s, I went under the Materials Tab/Toolbar and created a new Physically-Based Material and proceeded to load each of those 5 files in what I assumed was their corresponding category. Some of them, like Metal002_2K_Normal…where do I put that one??? Regardless, it didn’t quite work out right. I was hoping someone here knew the correct way to setup these metal PBR’s from cc0textures.com and could show me exactly how it’s done/what settings for each file. I took a couple screenshots of the PBR files/categories I’m assuming they go under. Any info would be greatly appreciated, thx.

image

What are you using for an environment to give your objects to reflect?
A beautifully chromed car bumper would look just like you described in a gray room.

Moved to Serengeti category.

Hi - use the “Create from texture files…” tool - you show it in one of your screen captures. Just do that, select all of the textures, and it will set it up for you.

Ok, I was wondering if that would set it automatically. I’ll def try it when I get a chance tonite. Also i didn’t know it had to use a reflective map/etc, honestly have never used anything other than preset materials included in Rhino. Thx

Hey Andy, I tried that option, “create from texture files,” it didn’t work out at all. Do ya Shift-select all 5 sub-files at once? I tried that and it could not recognize “Metalness”…so I tried to put it under “Metallic,”…it came out really distorted, so what did I do wrong here?
Thximage image

Can you send me the texture files?

Sorry I missed ya, yeah I’ll try to send the files in abit, thx

Hey Andy, here are the files:

Got it working better, but i think the texture scaling is way too big for the object.

See, in this example below, I created an ellipsoid and applied that PBR to it. I believe it’s scaling is very off, but not sure which parameter(s) is controlling this, any idea?

image

OK - I just tried those.

You are correct - “Metalness” is not recognised. This has now been fixed, but your solution is correct - it should go in the “Metallic” slot.

The reason for the stretching is that Rhino’s default mapping behaviour is to use the surface params of the NURBS surface. Typically, this doesn’t work all that well with materials that are dependant on scale.

PBR materials don’t include any information about scale - so this is something that you will have to do yourself. I would suggest for this kind of material that you want to set a real-world scale. So open the Texture Palette, select all 5 of the textures and switch the mapping to “WCS/OCS (box style)”. You should then decide how big, in model units, the textures look and set that in the “Size” field.

It’s difficult to know just by looking at the textures, but I would guess that each one is somewhere around one foot - 30cm.

Finally - the textures for this material don’t tile very well. In fact, they are very poor - so once you have the textures set up this way, youy’ll notice that they form a grid over the surface. There’s little you can do about this without running the textures through some kind of tiling tool.

  • Andy
1 Like

This is the finished material used in that screen capture.

Metal_from_discourse.rmtl (12.7 MB)

Thx Andy, I appreciate ur advice here. That sucks about the tiling. I was looking forward to using these. Never used PBR’s before and after seeing a quick demo by Ken Houchen (he used PBR’s from that cc0textures.com on a ray gun he made, didn’t see that tiling effect, maybe he scaled it much larger, idk…). Do u happen to know another quality source of PBR’s like these? Thx man

Also, the displacement won’t work really well when you don’t have dense enough geometry. Better to use only the normal map then. I believe this is what you’re seeing with the selection being (much) smaller than the rendered geometry.

Shouldn’t UV mapping resolve the tiling issue?

Not really - UV mapping is fine as long as you have a map that will cover the entire surface in one go. As soon as you start tiling it, you’ll get the same problem.

UV unwrapping is really just a way of getting less distorted coverage over the surface than the standard NURBS mapping.

I doubt there’s anything wrong with the cc0textures.com stuff per-se…although I certainly haven’t looked through them in any detail. It’s just that one doesn’t tile well…and this is a very common problem with bitmapped textures.

Is there something I am missing here?

That does look better, is this UV Mapped like you mentioned?

@jch51502
Yes, UV’s unwrapped in rhino. Of course more complicated shapes will be more complicated to unwrap too, maybe somewhat beyond the capabilities of rhino.
But there is always the possibility to use specialised software for the UV’s.

There are still some irregularities in the UV’s, but they dont really show in the rendered image.
You can see some strange wavy seams in the unwrapped UV square.