Arroway Textures

[Three D]

Hi.

 

Arroway seem to have some of the best textures available. Before I buy I want to test their cropped low-res samples but I'm not sure how to use them with Vray. The standard maps are provided - diffuse, specular and bump. Can anybody please advise me into which map slots the specular map goes in a vray material - HGlossiness? RGlossiness? Glossiness? So many slots.

 

Okay, I've now read this thread:

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/28415-specular-maps-vray.html

 

and it seems that the arroway specular map goes in the HGlossiness slot but according to the naming convention used by arroway (boards+02_s100+g100.jpg for example) the map should be used in a specular and a glossiness slot. Or am I wrong? Or does the HGlossiness slot do for both? I dunno.

 

Any help/advice would be very much appreciated.

 

Thanks.

[Stephen Thomas]

The specular/glossiness map should be placed in the Reflection and RGlossiness slot as the HGlossiness slot just deals with highlight glossiness. The slot named Glossiness is for glossy refractions and should be left alone in this case. The naming convention for the Arroway textures usually indicates the percentage you should set the map to e.g. b005 means bump map with a strength of 5.

 

This is just a starting point though and often I play around with the glossiness to get the effect I want by either changing the percentage spinner on the map rollout or by changing the overall reflection/glossiness levels via the colour swatches.

 

Feel free to experiment.

[Three D]

thanks for your help stef. i'll give it a try.

[jackb602]

Arroway explains their naming conventions here.

[Three D]

good man jackb602, thanks. i understand the naming convention for the files but was not sure if the specular maps should be used in more than one slot.

[jackb602]

I'm glad that helped. I actually learned a thing or two be rereading the FAQ.

 

Jack

[thomasj]

when you guys use arroway textures do you downsize the images, given that some are 10 mb, 20 mb and so on?

 

 

I tend to do that, especially in 3ds max, since i sometimes get a memory error issued.

[Stephen Thomas]

Usually changing them from png to jpeg is enough to get them to a manageable size. I wouldn't downsize them but if you only need to map a small area you could always do a crop of the original as they usually cover quite a big area, typically 6m x 6m.

[Three D]

i'm only using the free online samples at present but i'd imagine they would have to be reduced considerably unless you have huge ram limits on your workstation and rendering nodes - which i don't.

[Stephen Thomas]

Aren't the free samples already scaled down to around a tenth of the size anyway?

 

For the full size maps converting a 6000 x 6000 px .png file to a 1500 x 1500 px .jpg file will reduce the file size from around 20Mb to under 1Mb. Or like I said you could also crop it and just have it tile more.

[Three D]

they are scaled down but are good enough for testing. the originals are huge.

[surfen281]

Hi everybody.

Would like to share my settings here.

I read a lot of threads on several boards - but still not sure about the reflection maps (where to put them and what values)

So please tell me, if you find something wrong.

 

Thanx in advance,

mARTin

Edited December 30, 2009 by surfen281