Advanced textures and materials courses

[alexres]

Hello everyone

 

I'm looking for a good course and/or books on texturing and materials. Doesn't have to be render engine specific, although I'd prefer something for a V-Ray metalness workflow.

 

I haven't found anything that covers the more advanced aspects of this subject collectively.

 

Material needed :

 

-Exhaustive list of procedural textures and their most important settings and parameters

-Specific use of procedurals on a variety of material scenarios

-Ground/terrain texturing

-Mixing materials

-Mixing textures

-Tiling/Seamless textures

-Adding variety on large surfaces

-Opacity and alpha channel

-Baking

-Imperfections and their different implementation in terms of subtraction (scratches) / addition (smudges)

 

I have acquired some knowledge in bits and pieces, but it's always better to have a roadmap and Youtube won't cut it. Interested in both the whys and hows. I'd like to own the aforementioned concepts before I jump onto Substance and custom material creation. Any suggestions?

 

Alex

[John Dollus]

Just jump into Substance. All of those items are your checklist are addressed through Substance materials and it's handled differently than most other applications so why not start there if it's your intended goal?

[alexres]

Hi John,

 

While I am interested in adding Substance to my workflow for the occasional use, I'd rather try and work things out inside V-Ray for now. I simply don't have the time to get familiar with the concepts on that list AND learn new software from scratch. I'm already trying to get a hang of how things work inside Blender 2.8 so I can't handle more than that timewise. Using Skup+Plugins+VRay Next at the moment, so Substance probably wouldn't even work with that. Would it?

 

I was thinking of something at the level of Grant Warwick's Mastering VRay - Advanced materials, but I can't find his full course on that. Downloaded some imperfections textures from Gumroad and they included one of Grant's tutorials on how to use them. He seemed to be going deep into the settings while meticulously explaining why he did things the way he did. I read somewhere around here about the Viscorbel courses which also seem to be out of circulation now. Also, there was an amazing course from Steve Nelle back in the day and even though outdated now, it had a clear structure and was easy to follow. Few chapters on procedural textures and how to mix maps effectively there. This used to be on Lynda but not anymore. I've also been checking cgschool's courses here. Neoscape's Masterclass seems to have some interesting chapters on the subject (Real world materials, randomizations – fighting with repeating textures, complicated vs. simple). These seem well cool.

 

Substance seems to be great in bringing everything together but I wouldn't know how to take advantage of all it has to offer. I'm not even sure it is a necessity in a standard workflow for arch viz stills. I'd use it for specific materials that I can't find anywhere on the market. It's good to know as a bonus but I wouldn't start there. I've been checking Quixel's Mixer these days. Seems to be simpler and easier to learn but it is still just a tool and I'm lacking fundamental knowledge (mostly on how and when to use procedurals)

 

Guess it all comes down to experimentation but I learn best when I have things lined up in a certain order.

 

Thank you for your suggestion

[TomD_Arch]

What John said. Substance has a lot of great learning material out there. I bet if you spent a weekend with it or a few late nights after work you could be up and running in no time. It's kind of like when you took Calculus in school. It just changes the way your mind sees things, in a good way.