Cineversity

Hi All!

<<cross-posted to Redshift forums but thought I’d ask here because of all of the experts hanging out!>>

I’d appreciate some advice. I am trying to create a procedural material for sedimentary rock. (pic of Travertine Marble included). My current idea is to create a few layers of grayscale of different levels (20%, 40%, etc), distort these layers with noises, then add color. I’ve watched videos on procedural wood and other kinds but haven’t seen any way to create these layers.

How can I create these constant value layers procedurally with RS nodes in C4D ?

Thanks,
Greg

Hi Greg,

Not perfect, but I tried to share a few ideas inside the file, so it is a little bit crowded. Typically, my recommendation is to keep it as simple as possible and keep it fast.

I hope that is a good starting point for your ideas.

Travertine has so many qualities based on the handling of the surface (polished or raw, dull, filled, coated) and age (use and dirt), you might get many ways to express in your projects with it.

Rough Example
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/EfUYpUvyFCq6awWbo68IVyVfGGG6vVaUaz0aq7JXOws

There is perhaps some use of Subsurface Scattering needed.

All the best

Dr. Sassi,

WOW! I am super impressed. Can you give me any tips, general guidelines, or thought processes to use when creating something like this? Or is it just experience and intuition for you?

The travertine I am trying to create is that used on the plaza of the Salk Institute at UC San Diego. It seems to have visible but intermingled layers on the face of a vertical cut (perpendicular to the layers) and an odd mottled look on a cut parallel to the layers. Reference image url on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/8395936@N03/52085724845/in/dateposted-public/.

I’m going to take your example and create 3-4 different hues and see if I can layer these using a material layer.

I’ll also see about using the new RS Standard material as well.

Thanks a lot, Greg.

The mix is close to how you have described it, intuition, experience, and, let me add, the willingness to fail forward.

The other part is observation and excluding the phrase “I know that” for good from the process. Why? Because it closes the mind off and accesses the illusion of memory.

So, how to do it then? I wish I had a tile of that stone here and could hold it into the sun. I have stayed four weeks near the Spanish Staircase (Piazza Di Spagna), where you have 32,300 square feet (3,000 m2) of travertine stone, and we were sitting there every day. You get an idea of that stone, yet when I googled it (avoiding the “I know that” stuff), I was reminded how many varieties there are.

However, something is always given: color changes, patches of more or fewer dents, while sometimes these dents are filled and polished.

I have used Noise options for over 25 years, and the options in the Node system to offset or scale those noises are very powerful.

Besides, just scaling one Noise axis seemed to be a good starting point. Then came the failing forward part, exploring what works and whatnot.
As you can see, I have some math nodes in it. The only general idea I can give is “information flow”, providing or excluding (mask/alpha) information or changing it. Some are for color, others to drive certain things. Also, here is the main idea, lean back and think about it. Can you express what you like to have in one sentence? If that is said out loud, you have a direction. Anything that doesn’t fit in is the failing part, or as someone said, we found 2000 ways it will not work. However: There is no failure, only gained experience.

So, it took me a while, but if I would invest more time, I would certainly include some sliders to explore a working setup even more.

The second suggestion I can share is if the work seems to lead to nothing, go with the current idea, and exclude anything but two parameters (max) and when that is nearly muscle-memory, go back to the complex setup.

Yes, that is not a tutorial, and certainly not a do-this-do-that thingy, which I think is not ideal anyway. But I hope my answer will lead to exploration and patience. Whatever you do and what isn’t working, you might find in the future some use—filling the Creative Library, as my philosophy is.

Enjoy.

Thanks so much Dr. Sassi!
I’ve been working with noises seriously for about a year only so I think the experience is an important piece of creating these procedural materials. I have used Substance Designer and find the multitude of nodes available there actually make creating procedural materials, at least for me, somewhat easier. However, in the end, afaik, one ends up with static texture files and using them incurs all the disadvantages of using photographic textures.

It would be really great to have all the nodes of Substance Designer available in the C4D/Redshift node graph. Maybe Maxon will acquire Adobe next ... just kidding.

Cheers, and have a good weekend,
Greg

Thanks for the reply, Greg.

Sounds all good to me. I have the feeling that you don’t need a lot of input to get things going! Great. Keep creating; everything will be useful after a while.

Yes, static textures are tempting, but I think a little bit of “roughhousing” is always good. Since we are going more and more into the world of UHD-HDR TV, I guess we have to update our game anyway, in terms of quality. (Twenty years ago, 2K textures seemed to be sufficient, well… )

If copyright limitations are not an issue, having similar Nodes and workflows would be great. Since Maxon is well connected to Adobe, perhaps suggesting having SubstanceWare (fantasy term) a plugin for the Node editor would be excellent. Suggestions can be made via a Support ticket.
https://www.maxon.net/en/support-center

Cheers

P.S.: Just a few ideas.

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/MpJ5PrVb0fgTENyYtaZuBUmzb94zrciMh5K81XZ7gjS

Enjoy

I agree with your comment about upping our game. I modeled/textured/animated a 13-meter long prehistoric snake for The Science Circle and Minnesota Science Museum but the venue was Second Life (where the Science Circle works). I was limited to 1Kx1K textures but the customers wanted very high resolution. I ended up with the textures created in Substance Designer and Painter but needed 26 UDIMs to get about a 1 pixel to 1 sq mm resolution. It turned out ok but not really where I wanted to take my art.

For VR work we will need to be able to allow the viewer to get very close to artifacts and they should hold the resolution. I think procedural is the proper path.

Looking at the new material you posted today, a couple things come to mind:

1. I had not known that such noises and other nodes were available in Std/Phy rendering spaces. A lot could be done with what I see and your material on the tile is much closer to the reference images I have.
2. Std/Phy are a bit slower than RS (caveat: I have actually never used either Std or Phy so may not have optimized the material correctly).

I changed the dimensions of your tile to that which I am using in the Salk project (100cmx50cm) put it into a Cloner with 18 tiles (2x9). Here are some render times:

Using Instances in the Cloner:    RS:9s, Std:108s, Phy:548s
Using Multi-Instance in the Cloner: RS:8s, Std:25s,  Phy:68s

I am assuming that there is not a way to use the much more complex noises and nodes in RS. But, if there is, I would love to know how. If not, I will create a feature request support ticket.

Greg

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the reply. Please explore the Maxon Noise with the RS Node system; it comes pretty close. But, yes, please, submit a suggestion of what you need.

My personal view: I would strictly focus on that render if you have RS3D from the provided rendering engines in the menu. After your render time test, you might ignore anything else on the render menu.

Have a great start to your week.

Dr. Sassi,
Happy Monday! It was a productive few days for me given our discussion. I did dig deeper into the Maxon Noise and found some new noises I hadn’t known were there. Here is what I came up with. Some of your ideas and some of mine. I am pretty happy with the outcome and used no textures!
Thanks for your help!
Greg

Thanks for sharing, Greg.

Yes, this kind of detail that can be achieved is just great. The idea of shaders v. textures is that shaders typically can be scaled up enormously without losing quality.

Some notes: the ramp with the Step setting will create staircase patterns in close-ups.
Another note would be that the “Overlay” layer set is a tricky blend mode. One of the groups takes the middle gray as a split point. In this way, the blend mode splits in screen and multiply in the other half; this switch is often OK but can lead to surprises when critical values close to the midpoint are adjusted.

Very nice of you, and I hope your initial request with the samples nowhere will help many other people to dive into this.

Thank you.
 
My best wishes

Dr. Sassi,
Than you for the kind words.

Dr. Sassi - 23 May 2022 04:49 PM

Some notes: the ramp with the Step setting will create staircase patterns in close-ups.

Ah, thanks. I see this and have changed to Linear.

Dr. Sassi - 23 May 2022 04:49 PM

Another note would be that the “Overlay” layer set is a tricky blend mode. One of the groups takes the middle gray as a split point. In this way, the blend mode splits in screen and multiply in the other half; this switch is often OK but can lead to surprises when critical values close to the midpoint are adjusted.

I cannot see in the node graph to what you refer in saying, ‘“Overlay” layer set’. Could you offer a bit more explanation?

Thanks,
Greg

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, you are right! The “Blend Mode” was set to Normal, and the “Overlay Mode” was set to Over. All fine. I used some time for this, and I went too fast in the end. Sorry about this. However, I avoid overlay; perhaps that triggered my “impulsive” reaction.

https://help.maxon.net/c4d/en-us/Default.htm#_REDSHIFT_/html/Color+Layer.html

Cheers

I thought I would post the scene in which I used the suggestions of Dr. Sassi to create Travetine tiles. Although the detail of the tiles isn’t the main feature in this scene, as it’s a wide-angle shot, it will matter later as this scene will be an environment for a series of animated shorts where the main character walks around this environment, and thus, the tiles will be seen in close up.

Again, thanks to all in this forum for your help and patience with a newbie!

Here’s a link to the image on Flickr. Reducing the size would degrade the image too much, I think.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/8395936@N03/52148201000/in/album-72177720298418819/

Cheers,
Greg

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the idea to share!

If you added an image, that didn’t came through. (800x600 pix max.)

All the best

I added a link to the image on Flickr in the original post.
Thanks. I keep forgetting the limits on attachments.