Consistency in materials

[Matt Sugden]

I'm contemplating how I can improve effeciency in my working method and something which occurs to me is how everytime I create a scene I generally start from scratch with my materials. I often reuse textures but most of the time i set the material properites up independantly. Surely it would be much quicker to be able to drop a chrome in and know it is going to look and crucially act like a chrome material, but with the lighting being so different with each scene I produce I dont feel confident that I could rely on this.

 

Do others find that they able to work with a fairly rigid material library or is it a case that the lighting systems in vray for instance dont work in a real world way and thus always need a tweak to respond best to the scene lighting?

[Devin Johnston]

The only way you'll ever be able to work efficiently and fast is if you have a good material library at your disposal. You should set up a template scene for interior and exterior environments this will give you the consistency in lighting you're looking for. From there you can build a material library that will work with that scene and you won't have to remake the same thing over and over.

[CJI]

I usually save out materials that i use often, or are particularly complex/Unique to re-use in future projects, for example a colour gradient polycarbonate material.. They usually require some tweaking for the scene im working on it, but its still quicker than starting from scratch.

 

I dont do this as often as i should though...note to self: must do better.