V-Ray Materials
Dark Ribbed Wool
Reference Swatch
This a a Vray MTL that was created with fabric scans at 300 DPI, Such high resolution scans allow for easy scaling of the fabric wefts and warps to create larger or smaller stitches as needed.
The Dark Wool Ribbed Knit Material was created by plugging in a darker fabric texture and a lighter fabric texture to a Ramp texture node that was then piped into the diffuse attribute of the Material.
A high-contrast , black and white Specular map was piped into the reflection attribute of the Material. Glossiness was toned .573 and the IOR was set to 1.4 . Additionally, the Anisotropy and Anisotropy Rotation were tweaked to change how the specular light interacted with the purl and knit wales of the Knit material.
A toned-down black and white map was piped in to the bump Mapping node of the vray material shader.
Fabric
At one point, I found myself with a book-full of swatches and decided to make the most of it by creating some fabric Vray Materials. These fabrics are seamless and were created from high resolution scans of their respective swatches. The shaders themselves, were created using V-ray for Maya. You can check out the breakdowns for the five different fabrics below.
Scales
Built to be customizable, these scales take advantage of using Maya's hypershade and Vray Blend materials. I originally developed these scales as an R&D test while working on production for Dino Hunt. There is a tutorial on my blog outlining how to make scales starting from Zbrush and ending in Maya. I absolutely love animals and biology and scales are probably one of my favorite things to create, so my adventures with scales haven't stopped! I have explored the creation of a scale generator inside of Substance Designer and have also developed scale drag brushes for Zbrush artists. You can check all three of these out below!
Circular Scales
1.
The Fast SSS2 Material is comprised of three parts. It has an overall color and a scales mask and Ramp texture combined together into the subsurface color.
2.
The vray mtl contains a micro spec map multiplied over a ramp texture. The ramp texture has a Sampler info node for Facing Ratio plugged into it. This allows us to mimick scale incandescence where the spec is one color around the curves and another color in all other areas. The scales mask material is multipleid over the micro Spec and Ramp texture to emphasize the scale groves. Finally, the Scales mask, a tileable alpha created in Zbrush, is piped into the bump map.
3.
The Vray blend material contains the Fast SSS2 shader as the Base Material. The Vray material is piped in as a coat material with a blend amount set the the value of 1.00 and the additive mode checked.
