Texture wishes

[Kaare Baekgaard]

While the new rendering engine is significantly better than the previous, the same cannot be said about all the textures.

Metal is a real stinker. I have experimented with it for hours upon hours and still I fail to produce a decent texture with the 'metal' setting. Best bet for polished or stainless metal is the mirror setting. I have seen the texture dialogue from C4D so I know, that we are not getting the full package - but for metal something vital must be missing. Can we have that missing part, please?

I have requested the 'glow' setting for years. Now, that we have it, I find that exceptionally hard to control. The texture preview is little help: It is not reproducing the texture as it will appear in the model - and it is located on a different level in the dialogue, so it takes a lot of time to tweak the settings. Can we have the preview at all levels please - and a better preview? Glow factors of 1% and 100% looks pretty much the same in the preview window of the present version.

The noise bump dialogue offers a host of new options, which can produce very satisfactory results, but the dialogue is not very intuitive. The biggest issue here is the Global scale setting. Maybe it doesn't work at all? The fact is, that I cannot get the scale small enough. Any setting below 1% is rounded up or down - and apparently I need all settings to be somewhere between 0,001 and 0,1%. So can we please have support for decimals here?

Last but not least: What's the deal with the built-in textures, that comes with RW2011? How long did it take NNA to create all of them - 20 minutes? The point is, that they suck. I use hours to get my textures right - and I suppose, that so does all of NNA's customers. Wouldn't it be better, if NNA just did them right?

Edited May 8, 2011 by Kaare Baekgaard

[Kaare Baekgaard]

So I am reponding to myself now - I must get a life...

Just spend a couple of hours trying to get a decent brushed metal. I think, that it cannot be done in RW2011. Got all sort of exotic noise setting - like cell voronoi, poxo, stupl or sema, but none that denotes anything useful or that can be stretched or tweaked into - say - brushed stainless steel.

So I challenge anyone to produce a decent brushed metal and if succesful, share the result. I can't do it. Can you?

[Elite Exhibits]

Textures have become a thorn in our side. Almost no use for any built in textures as our designs need custom images. What is painfully apparent is what VW / RW 2011 does not do. We have Mask textures that work in VW 2010, but need to be fixed in 2011 - Not a complex thing, but the sleuth work became our own to do as no information has been located in Help or the Migration Docs in the Knowledgebase that covered such things. (Backwards maps for example)

We create multipage designs where one page is "Plan View" and 7 or 8 are rendered perspectives. This appear to be where the $ are but NNA should step away from the architecture world and see what has happened - Peter

[AndiACD]

Kaare, i don't use RW so i dont know, but have you tried the Cinema4D site, i'm guessing the same rules apply for RW. See if any of the seasoned C4D guys can help.

just my 2pence worth.

[grant_PD]

The same rules don't apply really. The textures in vw appear to be c4d "lite." Choices have been made for us regarding textures and how they work. Like Kaare, I've all but stopped using the metal shader in favor of the plastic one, as it offers more control.

I'm not sure why the shaders in RW were so completely overhauled. I had no problem with them for what they were. Now, I'm so baffled by the "glass" reflectivity shader and it's "mix two colors here and see what happens" magic potion that I just leave it alone.

Brushed metals are a staple for me. I had some success creating one by using a plastic shader, then adding a blur (2%). But my application was for something 10 feet away in the render. When it's time for the closeup I migrate to C4D. Which, I'm happy to say, is now painless. Just send to C4D. You can even leave it open and merge your changes you make in VW over to C4D.

It would be really nice if VW would ship with some files, not just libraries, but actual files that the authors had created to showcase their achievements. Due to the fact that VW has such a small market compared to 3d modeling/rendering packages like C4D or Maya et al, there is a dearth of documentation/examples to look at. Having a couple of really nicely done files to render and look at and scavenge would probably put a lot of the people who post to these boards on the right track.

[AndiACD]

It's the Classic "If it ain't broke, Don't fix it!" syndrome.

All too often VW get's a bit of nail varnish nobody need's while the requested fixes everyone asks for get lost in the dust. Parasolids and C4D engines are a dream come true for most but VW doesn't seem to get to make full use of what they can offer.

What we are given are more complex methods needed to reach the same goal that were once so simple, often lacking a suitable result.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of good has come out of recent developments, but smaller steps might be more agreeable.