chipmatthews

I render furniture for a living and I'm having a constant problem with V-Ray (3.6) when it comes to reflections on table tops. The back corner doesn't get any, and the closer the camera gets to coplanar to the top, the worse it is. This seems to be some kind of sampling problem but I've tried changing min/max values, light cache values, DMC type, light samples, and everything else I cant think of. Nothing makes a bit of difference. The only thing that helps is changing the BRDF of the material from Microfacet GTR and that just makes it less noticeable. The problem is still there. Does anyone have any idea what the issue is here and how to fix it? I always have to break out the clone stamp in Photoshop to fix the back corner after the fact. A sample image is attached.

Yep, I mentioned WilsonArt as one of the few in my first post. They have full sheet images for everything. There's one of their sample boards with chips of all of their laminates we use hanging on the wall right next to my workstation so I check scale that way. I also tend to exaggerate the scale a bit depending on the angle to get some of the finer patterns or wood grains to read a little better. I really wish Formica would follow their example. I tried contacting them directly and got nowhere.

Awesome, thanks! I completely missed that. They've got it pretty well hidden these days.

Interesting. I couldn't get anything particularly useful out of that link but it's an interesting approach at a configurator. I also couldn't find anything new at the Mohawk sites. They used to have a section called "Render Ready Images" which was excellent, but that went away several months ago and as far as I can see is still gone.

Great tip on Interface. Thanks! I can get away with a lot procedurals and other cheats on background details, but for foreground elements, and especially our products (mainly tables) I have to be accurate. Customers expect to get a product that matches what's in the renders. Most of the laminates we use I've gotten sorted (our standard product uses mostly WisonArt thankfully) but carpets have been a problem. Interface just became my new favorite carpet maker.

Thanks for the replies! Well three cheers for WilsonArt I guess as the only manufacturer I've seen who provides decent textures of their products. Craziness. I've been doing it the hard way by approximating in Photoshop. With tight deadlines it's hard to find the time to create new tileable textures every time, especially when they're supposed to match real products.

I've recently taken a new job in furniture visualization and often have to replicate real world commercial surfaces like specific laminates, carpets, and so on. I've been amazed and disheartened to discover that almost no manufacturers provide texture maps for visualization. There are a few exceptions. Wilson Art provides images of full laminate sheets, for example, but Formica does not. Mohawk used to provide decent texture maps of their carpets big enough to create a tiling texture from, but they seem to have stopped offering them recently. What do people in arch-viz and A&D do to solve this? Is there some secret source of which I'm not aware? Any insight would be appreciated. I'd think companies would want to make it easy for designers and viz artists to feature their wares. Am I missing something?