SLA for dummies

[kiwi]

First devour what you can find on the Bohdinut forum while its still up {wealth of information}



Second,experiment,experiment,experiment.



Third check out the Maxon tute materials which are made and disect them.



Fourth you should have an SLA manual PDF,read it its very important or all th shaders and channels will be just be a mass of confusion :)



Stu.

[kraal]

ok i have done all that...and like i said i am just an artist these thing mean nothing to me..to quote from the manual...'defines the number of octaves utilized by the noise function defined within the the' function 'combobox.....' that means nothing to me.....i need something like if you want to make a rock texture you need to do.... i have tried to dicect other shaders and end up with no greater understanding

[kraal]

where is the forum u talk about

[kiwi]

Heres the forum

http://forum.bhodinut.com/



I also was an artist when I came to 3D,but I found that you wont get a common sense explanation of all the settings in SLA,it will always be from say a programmers perspective.A number of us have mentioned this in the past as well,but all you can do is reverse engineer materials and shaders until you understand what each channel and shader does,sorry,its what I also had to do :hmm:



Stu.

[kraal]

i looked at the forum and got some help i think the problem i am having is not knowing what is used for what...i am getting it maybe i just need to slow down and go little by little

[kraal]

ok after playing around with cheen i came up with this for my asteroid...any pointers or better aproaches?

[kiwi]

That looks ok :)



For an asteroid here is what I would do.Make a new material and In the color channel go to 2d noise and select two differing brown colors for our color map.Next go to specular and mess around with the settings until you get a rock type specular or reflection.Set the reflection channel itself to about 3%.Put your color map in the specular color channel.Go to illumination at the bottom of material window and select oren nayar,where it says phong,set diffuse fall off to -10.On to diffusion here select from the shaders available to your right "Dirty Nuts",now go to render settings and in the effects window from the menu on the right choose dirty nuts,to enable it in your render :) Also try setting specular to metal and experiment with that,oh ya set your lights shadow to hard because its in space.



I am tired and thats all just off the top of my head so to speak,but see if it works for you.



Stu.

[Erik Heyninck]

I personally find that the explanation Maxon gives in the manual isn't bad at all. Did you read that?

[medula]

Originally posted by kraal
i looked at the forum and got some help i think the problem i am having is not knowing what is used for what...i am getting it maybe i just need to slow down and go little by little

The version 8 manual should give you a good general direction about what shader is good for what. Page 700 for example shows all the types of noises.

It looks alien at first, but take the time to work with just one type of shader to get a feel for them as a whole.

I do think you make a good point about the need for a concise manual of sorts.

Build that wall not all at once . . . but instead . . . do it brick by brick.

[kraal]

the version 8 manual covers sla....hmmm...i missed something time to go back and read...

[kraal]

ok heres a new on still using cheen tried you way kiwi but too many parameters to adjust to get the feel i want got out of hand quickly but cheen seems to be working fine....now i have 2 different types of roughness the first one is ober the second is buya is there a way to mix these???? i thought fusion but could not figure that one out to do what i need....(i tried fussion in a bumb channel but never got accest to cheen) also it is starting to get a 'oil painting look' does anyone know what is causing this 'smoothness '

[Erik Heyninck]

As far as I know, threedee shaders cannot be mixed like that.
Yet, you can make a copy (Ctrl/Cmd drag in the manager), leave at the same place and give both another shader. By varying the bumps on the model you gan get each one in turn at the surface. Not a beautiful method, but it does work. But I am but a beginner. Someone will come up with a better method, for example using selection tags.

Here's an example usig Cheen with Buya and Ober. I don't know how to upload the zipped C4D, but if I find out, it'll be here.

[Claudio72]

http://forum.bhodinut.com/viewtopic.php?t=705

[H. Ikeda]

Hi kraal,

Well, you could also find SLA examples in the tutorial manual of R8. Also you'd understand them quickly if you study SLA presets found in internet.
And as Erik suggested, you couldn't use a BN channel shader and a volume shader at the same time, except for some properties in volume shaders such as fusing in NUKEI and maybe layered textures.

So first you have to decide which type you'd use, generally channel shaders are more flexible using their shader tree but volume shaders have some amazing properties.

FYI, channel shaders are classified as follows, but this is not an official one:

(1) Branch(used as branching in shader tree) --- Distorter, Fusion
(2) Filter --- Colorizer, Brightness, Hue, Posterizer, (Projector)
(3) Element shader --- 2D Noise, 3D Noise, Banj, Falloff, Fresnel, Gradient, Lumas, Proximal, Tiles

Strictly, branches and filters aren't shaders, since we cannot get any texture only with them. As element shaders, we can also use shaders other than SLA, i.e., images, standard shaders and plugins.

Cheers,

[kraal]

thanks i think that helps me out a lot to figure out how to mess around with the settings

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