the one stop shopping experience

[digitalcarbon]

a type of "Home Depot" feeling for materials

 

 

[Matt Overton]

Love it.

[zoomer]

When I saw the title I was thinking, what is he talking about again

but that hyper realistic sim city approach to circumference problems in VW and virtuality is just brilliant.
I love it !

[Tom Klaber]

Ha! This is fun, but the idea of having to virtually roam the isles at Home Depot every time I needed a resource, gives me a headache.

Does the resource manager solve any of the problems?

[zoomer]

17 minutes ago, Tom Klaber said:

Does the resource manager solve any of the problems?

I would say yes.
It has a better preview than Ressource Browser, though not unlimited.
(It also depends on what preview will be provided)
You can search for and show all "Concrete" from all source files.

Still I think DM's approach will be a valid alternative.
Whenever he starts a larger Material session, he can open his Material Store, examine
things in 3D or rendered and just copy his Cubes over.
Could be Spheres or rounded Cubes also to better see reflections.

Edited September 13, 2016 by zoomer

[PVA - Admin]

If it were the SOLE method of perusing through resources it would drive me absolutely insane, but as a separate highly visual or "guided-tour" presentation setup this is very cool.

[Tom Klaber]

Down the road, I think VW needs to have better previews of textures.  Something like maxwell.  In some of the videos ,I started to see some funky shape used to sample textures.  Ideally, there would be a pre-rendered 3D version that you could spin and see how it reacted to light right from the resource browser.  

[PVA - Admin]

Agreed. Light and shadow playing across the surface is super important to get a good feel of what the texture really is. Especially with wet or otherwise reflective materials. The simple sphere/box/plane options we offer are insufficient and I often have to create little lightboxes and render them to check out materials first.

[Tom Klaber]

This as an example works pretty well.    If we had previews like this it would be much better.  

[PVA - Admin]

Maxwell's is my favorite, I use their materials all the time and I rarely need to check anything before implementing it as their preview is so thorough. It actually is a little subtle.

1) The solid grey ball inside shows not only transparency but also the level of refraction a transparent material has.

2) the curve suddenly sliced off as a straight edge shows you not only what rounded edges are like but also sharp corner conditions, very important when testing Grass or Displacement shaders.

3) The grid underneath helps show reflectivity but can also be used to give you a sense of size or scale.

4) There is a main directional light up and to the left, but also a slight ambient light all around that gives the impression of what a final render would look like.

5) The ever so slight depth of field just around the back edges and sides shows you what the material will look like when not focused directly on, which SEEMS unimportant but how a texture appears in peripheral vision is actually very noticeable with things like brick or tile that adhere to a grid, you dont want them looking like pixels or jumbled nothingness when you're using camera effects or if you're doing post processing for lensing.

6) It even shows the actual size printed right on the base in CM. Very slick and probably not too hard to tie it to the field in the actual texture configuration that controls size.

The render preview is SUPER important to the base experience of rendering and I wanna polish ours up.

[zoomer]

If we look at the 3D App world,

Modo hasn't even a Material Preview or Thumbnails !
Sounds strange but when working with Materials you are in a special Render Layout Workspace.
And the fast and correct Preview (CPU only btw) just shows the whole Model (if you wish)

More applicable in this case may be the C4D System with Material Previews.
Like VW it has defaults to use most suitable Cubes, Spheres, ... to examine your Material.
But these preview Examples are just normal 3D files. So there is much more variety like Cubes
with rounded edges and it can be all kind of geometry, light setup and environment to better
see even Transparency and Reflections.
In case of using VRAY means that it will deliver preview setups that have a calibrated Environment
with HDRI Backgrounds and full Global Illumination calculated by VRAY Renderer.
These won't be that fast of course, but what you see is what you really get.

Especially important for nowadays Physically Based Rendering, as things like the Image Textures used,
usually don't represent the Material Values as it should be but already a kind of rendering according to its
environment when they were created or photographed.
A calibrated Preview will prevent too bright Materials with too less light absorption.

Edited September 13, 2016 by zoomer

[digitalcarbon]

i guess its more about user experience 

i think this would work better for all library files

 

[Markvl]

I think the Resource Manager will be a huge improvement and I'm looking forward to it.

I like @digitalmechanicsexample above of a product resource.  I do this with a number of kinds of objects myself.  I have a vwx file for anything pertaining to decks for instance and another for precast

concrete stairs, aluminum railings, columns, etc. and I often open these files directly to grab what I want rather than using the resource browser that often just doesn't show objects well.  Again hoping the new Resource Manager will up the anti on this.