Polligon Metal Textures

[imikej]

We have been early supporters of Polligon textures but recently I found I wasn't getting the results we should with their metals.  Will G. said he wasn't having any trouble, so figured it was a west coast thing.  A quick email to Polligon and we got some excellent support.  First rate.  There are a few tricks they shared, that we will try to summarize in a subsequent post.  In the meantime, here is a bit of fun we had after testing their suggestions.

[mattjgerard]

I too have struggled to get really good looks with poliigon metals. I've watched the tutorials and read everything I can, but just can't get them to work right the way I want, so any help would be appreciated. I can get textures like tiles and dirt to work, but metals are tough.  I even made a blank material template with the color inverse nodes in place, but not all the downloads come with the same textures, so its never a drag and drop solution.

[imikej]

Ok, here goes.  I've done three screen grabs to try to make this clear-ish.  The large sphere is UV mapped and the smaller one is not.  There are material graphs for both.  They are effectively the same other than setting Sphere vs. UV as the mapping parameter and adjusting the scale if necessary.  In this case, I didn't adjust the scale because I set the scale above the part level.

[mattjgerard]

Thanks for those, its similar to what I'm using now, I have a template that I set up from their tutorials on the poliigon website. I'll compare yours with mine today and see what I come up with.

I think that more of my problem lies in lighting, since metals are made to look good so much because of their surroundings. I know for a fact that I need to beef up that part of my learning. Using the HDRI editor properly and all that.

Its also just intuitively knowing what all the adjustments in the MatGraph do, so if I look at a material and want to make it look a certain way, know what buttons to push right away instead of just randomly changing values and hoping something works.

[imikej]

Hey, Matt--the key difference from what I had (when I was having a problem) is the Color Adjust and having it set to 0.055.  That makes the difference.  As far as lighting goes, an environmental scene like this stairwell is a good test for metal.  It has a combination of different light sources so you can really see what you are getting.  Let me know if I can help any other way.  I have to say that the folks at Polligon were super helpful in showing me how to get this sorted.  Great folks.

[Will Gibbons]

Looks good Mike,

I don't want to make promises, but we'll probably do some online content walking through a workflow using their assets one the schedule allows it. Thanks for sharing here.