Hi!
I wanted to post here the final images of the last series of renders I did with Luxcore!
Also I would like to give some comments/feedback of things I bumped during this project that would be great if considered in future versions of this amazing render engine
- I had some problems with the triplanar nodes. When I first tried, they seem to create some weird effects in the textures, and I noticed that by setting the images to "box" projection (either for "classic" textures as well for normal maps) it worked correctly/much better rather than using those nodes. I believe I'm missing something with them but at first sight, they seemed redundant to me. However, a slider of the overlap factor of the triplanar projection would be great to have.
- As I mentioned in a recent post I made, it would be great to have a more intuitive gradient node. Gradients are imho an essential part of many visualization fields. As it is right now, it is complicated to have control over them.
- The "random per island" node would be great if it can recognize UV islands as "separate" parts of the same entity.
- I couldn't use the anisotropy option (in the brake disks) because it required an specific UV map to work. In the case of this object is almost "impossible" to create that UV map as the geometry have holes and makes it very hard to be unwrapped into the expected way for it to work. A similar approach to systems like the one cycles uses would be cool to have.
- I insist in having a a falloff/fresnel control node
For the car paint I used a combination of the "carpaint" shader (as base material) + "glossy coating" one to control the fresnel effect by an IOR number of the coating layer. The car paint last layer is way to reflective in surfaces that are perpendicular the viewpoint and they can be only increased or decreased as an overall effect. By disabling the effect of this last layer and combining it with the coating node (and setting its IOR to a low number like 1.2-1.4) I was able to create, what I believe a more convincing looking carpaint material. Anyway the falloff node would not only be useful for this effect but for many others as well.
- A "bevel" node would be great to control micro border roundness as well.
I would like to emphasize that I commenting this in order to give you my most humble feedback as this is, as I believe, a way to contribute to this great project! I admire your capacity to translate all this rendering considerations into code!
Finally, you can find a bit more info in any of the following projects and a time lapse as well!!
Blender artists
Artstation
Behance
Youtube
Regards, saludos!
Pablo