So you are saying it would be useful to have a huge pile of automatically generated glass/paint/plastic materials with different reflections, transparencies and colors - and polish types. And dump them all in the material library so you can drag them across?
Or are you talking about different types of materials that would make our library more “extensive”?
Because at the moment, I fully understand that it is architecturally focused - I have bias in that area.
Perhaps, to differentiate your product from others, rather than having “a huge pile of automatically generated materials” it would be useful to change the palette interface such that a central base material (e.g. plain glass) is surrounded by preset variants to show how the base material can be modified and expose the controls and settings that need to be adjusted, and by how much, to achieve the effect shown. That’s where I hit a wall with many of these material editors - there are so many variables, many of them apparently affecting appearance in a non-linear manner so it’s very easy to screw things up and not realise why. That’s the nerdy power-user that Gustavo refers to, I think. I don’t count myself amongst their number.
As a designer, I usually have a very clear idea in my minds’ eye what I want to achieve. If the crap-shoot endless materials libraries as illustrated above don’t happen to offer what I’m thinking of, the next question I’ll ask myself is "OK, what do I need to tweak to make (picks material from palette) that one what I’m after? It’s very rarely I see a material in a stock library that fits my desires exactly. In that respect, I agree that huge libraries of materials are often a waste of time. That is usually where the fun, and invariably ultimate frustration, starts. Rather than blocks of material variations, they could be arranged like ripples in a pool.
That’s precisely what the current system does. Is anyone actually looking at the product and trying to use it?
Well in that case, it looks as though we’re all flailing in your wake. Perhaps a bit of documentation wouldn’t go amiss
Or the design is too “clean” to be discoverable.
And yes, we are working on documentation for this new V6 rendering capability feature.
Hi Andy,
It’s nice to be able to easily tweak a material but you must have a good base with which to start from.
With what’s currently included in Rhino you can’t talk about a library.
In industrial design I’d say 95% of the materials we work with are metals and plastics. With a few extras like leather and glass it covers all our needs. There’s none of these in the current library.
It seems like there’s a nice assortment of wood but I can’t try them; when I use one the texture is missing;
I don’t think we’re asking for a library the has every possible shade of anodized aluminum, but a couple of the most usual would go a long way to simplify our work. Anyway, tweaking a color is the simplest thing to do, but getting the right blurriness/anisotropy/reflectivity can be a headache.
A good example is the V-Ray Express library;
It’s about 100 materials, not thousands, and it’s a very good resource to start from.
It seems like choosing a type of material when creating a new one, like if I choose “plastic”, what happens is that most of the material settings are hidden.
So when I choose “plastic” I get the color picker and three sliders. If my plastic material has a texture (which plastic hasn’t?) I start from scratch and choose “Use a new material” and then “Custom”. I can then add textures a bumpmaps or else. I can now see other settings that could be needed in all types of materials like “Alpha transparency”.
I understand the balance you want to achieve between ease of use, discoverability, access to advanced settings, etc. but I feel I get the worst of all this.
I have some experience teaching V-Ray where the material editor settings can be very intimidating (and not very logical in its presentation). But all the settings are available if the need arise. If I want to add a transparency map to my glass material so some parts of the object a not visible, something you wouldn’t think of when you create a glass material, it’s possible without starting from scratch.
Try this, if you switch the drop down material type from Plastic to Custom the settings used so far will transfer. Any better?
Hi Brian,
I noticed, it’s nice, but frankly that’s the least to be expected.
The fact that the texture is missing for you is clearly a bug that we have to fix. However - the textures are downloaded on demand - my guess is that something has failed here.
That’s the trouble - that’s the balance we have to achieve.
I wonder if we should consider adding some bump options for the simple materials?
- Andy
Leather is certainly there (under “Fauna”) - glass is one of the basics.
That’s the idea - with ID, my guess is that 95% of users will be just fine with the glass/plastic/paint/metal basic types. That means you end up just choosing the color for each component, and you might have a slider or two to fiddle with - but there’s no way to make your material look like something else by mistake. If you pick glass, it will look like some kind of glass no matter what you change.
- Andy
What time of texture are you talking about? Something very specifically embossed - in a recognisable pattern? Or just “roughened”?
- Andy
That hits the nail on the head for me Marc… I would love to see a similar palette in Rhino.
I am happy dabble and tweak materials, but a decent starting point - particularly with metals and plastics - is a great help in getting to a pleasing end result.
Good feature, but counter intuitive.
There should be something more semantic. Like a button that reads advanced or customize. imo that is the paradigm for going a step deeper into options and settings.
It’s probably not a problem if the switch to custom material is made when that button is pressed.
Relating to semantics, what about changing ‘Custom’ to ‘Customized’ it’s a few extra characters but the meaning much more reflects the workings of the system.
My2c
- Willem
No.
I think it’s a good decision to keep it simple. Adding this will open the door for a full set of options.
IMO, someone missing a bumpmap is expert enough.
NinjaEdit:
I do see now how a bumpmap could be assigned, yet not exposed, would be beneficial. Only entering ‘customise mode’ would expose the textures. But the basic material only has a strength and scale/size setting…
My2c
Willem
To my needs a standard material setting has always been lacking, a roughness for the reflection value, so we don’t have to add a noise shader to the bump. Having a realtime slider is so much better, more intuitive and faster, and I have never understood why Rhino doesn’t have this, it’s in most rendering apps I have used.
By the way, metal polish doesn’t seem work in neither openGL nor in Rhino Render. (I presume this should be the roughness) Neither does frosting work for glass:
But they “work” in rendered mode. the frosting is very rough (200 samples might be too little as default setting), and the metal looks like it isn’t sampling the average reflection values correctly (looks too white) but that might be right, I have not invested much time in evaluating it. (Also “rendered” doesn’t update material changes on the fly, it has to be turned off and on again)
Also if I change the color of the metal and then undo, it doesn’t undo the changes.
Here the upper copper is sat to 0%, the middle to 50% and the lower is 100% polish and the upper materials doesn’t look like metal to me, do you agree?
Even engineering tools like Solidworks get the importance of simplifying the rendering workflow for users, in a visual, preset, drag-and-drop way:
The frost/clarity/polish of the several materials is a bit off in RhinoCycles indeed. I am aware of this problem, and I have a fix locally for that.
Technically speaking: the roughness parameter of several Cycles BSDF nodes is much more aggressive than how Rhino does it. The currently used 0.0-1.0 range will be converted such that the BSDF roughness of the top is used.
I’ll do this first thing tomorrow morning so that you can play with these material settings again in a more useful way 
/Nathan