Poliigon

[MrTomB]

Hi, anyone used 'poliigon' materials?

Started a trial and just not getting to grips with it, the bump maps don't seem to be effective, all materials I have tried are looking flat. Followed the tutorials online but still not happy

[mattjgerard]

Yes, I've been looking around for the proper ways to use these materials in keyshot, and there isn't very much out there. See this thread for my struggles, and some insight that seemed to help. Granted I was working with the water drop maps, and those might need some different tweaking. In short, I had to play around alot with the brightness/contrast controls to get anything to work remotely correctly in the bump and alpha overlay channels.

https://www.keyshot.com/forum/index.php?topic=15788.0

quickly, this is how I interpreted the files from poliigon to be connected in the MatGraph

Diffuse = Color
Normal = Bump
Displacement- Not used
Reflection- Specular
Gloss- Roughness

Hopefully that will point you in the right direction. Get to love the MatGraph and the "C" key on the keyboard to solo different nodes to see what is going on with them.

[DMerz III]

Hey MrTomB, a big benefit from Poliigon material maps would be the use of displacement, this is what truely creates 'dimension' via mapping by affecting the polygons that make up the surface. Unfortunately at this time, Keyshot does not take advantage of these maps, but if you have access to the model in your modeling program, you could apply it there, and bring that geometry baked into Keyshot, then apply the rest of the maps as MattjGerard mention.

[mattjgerard]

Imma gonna try that in C4D, I have to check if my version supports subpoly displacement. gonna bump the filesize up a bit I'm afraid, but will be interesting to see the effects. wonder if it will be hard to match the scale of the textures to the displacement geometry, as I've yet to full nail down how KS scaling works relative to DPI and model scale yet.

[DMerz III]

If your version of C4D doesn't support it, Blender's latest does, and it is always free. Lots of free tutorials around as well to help you get it done.

[mattjgerard]

Gah, I keep hearing that I need to learn blender. I opened it a year ago, and promptly shut it off after trying to make sense of the user interface. All that fantastic code hidden behind a GUI that looks like the best 1987 had to offer. *shudder*

I know there has probably been some huge progress in that area since then, so I'll give it another shot if I need to. Hard to say no to free stuff, especially if it works. I need to learn to get past the interface.

[DMerz III]

I had the exact same reaction when I first opened Blender, it just DIDN'T make sense, so I started looking into C4D, but before I purchased it...I got in a pinch with a project and needed something NOW, then I looked at my wallet and decided to give Blender another look, this time, I checked out Blender Guru's beginner series, just to get familiar, and I haven't looked back. Blender's UI seems foreign at first, but once you get into it and actually make something, you get the hang of it after about 10 hours in the program and you kind of appreciate its weird little way of doing things, makes it highly robust and capable.

Blender Guru also has a printable 'hotkey' list which I would recommend printing right away. I literally reference it all of the time,  and eventually, you get muscle memory for certain commands.  Good luck

[mattjgerard]

Thanks for the tips, I'll be looking into it next week. We are trying to decide here on if to stick with 3DSMAX (yech) or switch to Blender or C4D. Naturally I'm voting for C4D, as I have 7 years of moderate expiereince with, but I know that it isn't the best for interacting with CAD docs. But the lack of a plug in bridge with blender and keyshot is not a good thing, we will be using something like that on a daily basis. I'm really trying to get the hang of the limitations of the LiveLinking functions, which if robust enough would be a lifesaver for us.

[DMerz III]

You're right there, it doesn't have as much support. Also just an FYI, there's a newly released program called MaxtoBlend (i think) which translates 3dsmax files to be opened in Blender, which could be useful if you go down that route and need to access old files from Max. You'll still need a copy of max in order to run the translation though.

[mattjgerard]

Don't get me started on 3DS MAX, we will be here forever. I should probably start another thread on it, but yeah, there is absolutely no way to open a .max file without having a valid running copy of MAX on the computer. I ran the whole situation by Robert Lansdale the author of the Okino Nugraf 3D translation software package, I've used that for years for converting neutral files from ProE into cinema 4d files. Send him one question, and he will respond with a 3 page dissertation and the history behind it all. Very fascinating guy, and very awesome translation software.

Anyway,  i was trying to use his apps to translate our 10 year old library of .max files to something else (fbx, c4d, etc), because we will most likely be ending our autodesk subscription service next year and going with C4D (or blender). He's the one that told me the history of the ol .3ds and the new .max files, and why the can't be read without MAX installed.

In a word, I'm screwed into manually converting years of max files, or learning max. I'd rather do the conversions