Standard glass fibre PCB (FR4)

[Eriond]

Hi. I'm looking for a way to add a very subtle texture to the surface of printed circuit boards. Those are commonly manufactured from a glass fibre substrate called FR4 (Flame Retardant 4). The substrate is made from an epoxi resin that is poured over multiple layers of woven glass fibre mat. That mat's texture comes through onto the copper plating, just the slightest, when viewed at an angle as shown in the attached photos (of a real PCB ).
What would you suggest as a method to achieve this effect? I have seen that PCB's are often rendered as a completely flat, shiny surfaces, which causes them to loose some realism.

[sloanelliot]

The simplest way to achieve this would be to just use a modified procedural weave node as your bump channel for the material if you want to really customize the shape of that underlying mesh pattern. If that doesn't matter, just use a predefined bump or normal map, and for added realism, you can also pipe that into a displacement node. And if there are areas where you don't want the effect (i.e., where the actual copper leads run, or along the outer edges, etc.), you can use a color composite node to blend your original bump map data with either a custom curvature node (to soften the effect around the edges) or, say, the same map that's driving the visibility of the copper leads, etc., to essentially "subtract" those parts from the bump/displacement data..

[Eriond]

Excellent reply, thank you.

[designgestalt]

Hello Eriond,
I did not really have too much time to play around with it, but I guess something like this should lead into the right direction ...
cheers
designgestalt

[Eriond]

Thanks!
I have KS 8.2, and it won't allow me to open your file. Could you export it in an older format?
Meanwhile, I'll see if I can reproduce that effect on my own.

[designgestalt]

sorry for the late reply, I a really swamped at the moment ...
here is the file as a KS6 format, which is the only legacy file version I can export...
not sure if this will work ...

cheers
designgestalt