HDRI + LOOK DEV'T TECHNICAL JOURNAL

LOOK DEVELOPMENT OF MIA MATERIAL IN B4DA55

and HDRI settings

1. Simply Plug In your HDRi 

- with Final Gathering on

- Accuracy to 50

- Primary Diffuse Scale to 2

- Color Gain (HDRI=3)

- Enable Default Light OFF

First of all, let's have the basic understanding of mia material parameters: http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2010help/mr/shaders/architectural/arch_mtl.html#parameters

"The mental ray mia_material is a monolithic material shader that is designed to support most materials used by architectural and product design renderings. It supports most hard-surface materials such as metal, wood and glass. It is especially tuned for fast glossy reflections and refractions (replacing the DGS material) and high-quality glass (replacing the dielectric material)."  

Basically in our example here we're going to be tweaking

Reflection - just how much light is being reflected in the model

Glossiness - The amount to diffuse the shininess 

Let's take a look at the first render of the torso with the specifications below.

I added a bit of roughness to tone the specular a little bit.

 i noticed that this setting is too shiny and smooth which defy the idea of our robot which is supposed to be a battle worn one. Therefore, let's tweak some of these parameters plus the adding maps to our REFLECTION AND GLOSSINESS.

LET ME EXPERIMENT on some instances of playing around with ref and glo.

R= .6

G= .4

ROUGHNESS= 1

gives you that very soft matte like texture but with a bit of specularity.

Notice that there are some grainy noise on the spec, this is because of the glossy samples, the higher the value the less it flickers but now it's evident because it is set to 8

R= 1

G= .579

GS= 75

ROUGHNESS= 1

R= 1

G= 1

ROUGHNESS=0

 R= 1

G= 0

ROUGHNESS=0

after trying out these experiments, we can now have the clear understanding of how reflectivity and glossiness affect it each other.

- reflectivity and glossiness on both power gives us the harshest spec we can ever have

- with the help of glossiness, we are able to tweak the this intensity by somehow blurring it but it varies with its samples. The higher the better, the lower , the noise is worse

- the more we tweak the differences of both, the higher render time it will get

NOW LETS PLUG IN OUR B AND W MAP ON OUR REFLECTION TO SEE THE EFFECT

COLOR PROFILE= LINEAR SRGB

ALPHA IS LUMINANCE 

ROUGHNESS = 0

 ROUGHNESS = 1

 G= .281

not much of a difference! we see that lighter parts are all gradually illuminated based on the map

LETS TRY TO PLUG IT IN GLOSSINESS!

we see that kind that matte-ish carbon like effect

ROUGHNESS= 1

LETS PLUG IN BOTH!

this is what we are looking for! to give that extinct looking metal that has been battle scarred! I also kind of rotated the HDR lighting so we can have a better illumination on what is going on

but.. let me just try to take out the LINEAR in the color profile of the map for both ref and glo and see how it goes..

 A very close relationship with the final but this one is a bit darker? i guess it's because of gamma issues.

NOW LETS PLUG THE BUMP! 

this one is ample, bumping out the scratches gradually.

 

BUT! FOR THE FINAL TORSO, WE ENCOUNTERED SOME PROBLEMS WITH THE DISPLAY WHICH IS VERY IMPORTANT!

- remember that enable color management to be ticked with sRGB to Linear

- on your render window - right click- display - color management

this will give us the REAL output of our render.

Render the sequences in .exr formats\

CHEERS!!