Welcome everyone I thought I would open this blog post with this sort of non formal message about cool things to get started.
First of all if your hair look like this – COVID-19 Vaccine was not made widely available yet.
And you probably ordering a whole lot of Uber Eats online and doing some cool digital work.
And if you do – here is a cool set of wallpapers for you offered by Framer App.
https://www.framer.com/wallpapers/
Go ahead and get them while they are giving them away – they look awesome on the Mac’s architecture.
My personal faviourite is the one with the Spectrum Scatter and it is also the most colourful one.
Anyway I though before I dive into CGFX shading I would also share with you the amazing news of me finally finidng a mesh for my prime character in the project White Storm.
Isn’t she stunning? This is in the Marmoset Toolbag ( I think it is how we call it ). And if you have a chance to install it – go ahead. The free version is giving you 30 days. And I would avoid investing unless you know what it is for. Because it is simply a visualisation framework.
And a great material developer software. Which I am not that great at because I have just stated to explore these sort of things. And in general the real-time shading.
You see, rendering has always been a bottle neck in 3D. It made me to be stuck for years unless I have realised things can be simplier than setting up Mental Ray and waiting for 40 minutes to see a single jpg.
And currently visual quality like this is available to you for just fourty pounds of the UK based website 3dscanstore.com
Before that level of what SketchFab is offering now at just the browser visualisation level I used to investigate CGFX shaders that help to understand real-time capabilities of the GPU unit you have under your hands if you are on the laptop.
These days graphics cards are very powerful and they are heavy. Not my personal faviorite to carry around unless you can show me anything less than one kilogram with more than an internal Intel IRIS.
Before we will aplify your intelligence on CGFX shaders I wanted to share with you from how I have learnt it.
And I guess it will be important to say that CGFX shaders are for the Autodesk Maya viewport visualisation.
3Ds Max is also using CGFX shaders so all of you Rockstar Games people – a massive shout out!! Great job!~
So yes, Eat3D is an amazing and very I gues unique set of training videos for Artists that has one best item in their collection:
https://www.amazon.com/Shader-Production-Writing-Custom-Shaders/dp/B005LDJOK8
And this is the only source of a comprehensive learning of CGFX shaders I have found online.
You can find some of them online in terms of example files. And try them out directly.
And they are also can be used in the Unity 3D form too.
So there is plenty of them available for learning.
Eat3D course is nice because it teaches you a general framework for how to write everything from scratch and understand shader syntax.
Sorry for showing you a scary monster everyone, but this is SSS ( Sub-Surface Scattering ) material for the skin. That actually supports the mimicing of the light scatter, normal maps, diffuse and some other great maps. Some people love Orks so it is popular in the genre to make something scary.
And although this is a nice source of investigation this very clever shader is much more realistically mimics the human skin visualised in the Maya viewport.
I would say it is not entirely accurate SSS model but it makes a good representation of it with the gradient map:
https://polycount.com/discussion/49920/free-maya-max-cgfx-fx-shader
Here is the download link:
http://www.mentalwarp.com/~brice/download/GenericBRDF_1-0.zip
These cool people make this sort of game here.
Anyway.
With these set of files you can setup a very cool visualisation for the skin sort of material. Or it can be used for rubber type objects as well.
At the very end of my experience with CGFX shaders – I have developed a nice libruary mostly based on Eat3D and this BRDF-based material.
Ooops. These are actually the original sources from the Eat3D – and as you can see they are giving you the absolute basics, from scratch and develop it all the way to the Universal Uber shader. Yes, just like Uber Eats!
I love the car shader as well because it is very mentallic.
But this is the actual libruary of the entire project White Storm of all the final materials that I have implemented in the 3D Scene.
I have called them based on the entire scene nomenclature I was dealing with.
And I hope I can find a screenshot for you have the scene did look like back in the day once I had a very nice green light with it.
Mostly because I had a chance to spend time in the remote village called Portmagee.
I was planning to only visit for one day and make a sail. But the weather was very unfortunate and I had to wait for a few days before we could sail out.
And because I was allowed to stay in the entire house on my own I was privilleged enough to basically spend time without the internet connection purely focusing my attention on the Maya scene.
For some reason this project – White Storm is a heavy burden for my life. Because every time I do it I feel frustration, pain and the feeling of being overwhelmed.
Because I have overengineered it too much.
And did not know about 3D technology as much as I do now…
And I guess some of the technologies were not available for me when I was doing my project.
And a lot of it also my nature to over-complicate things too much. And you do practice 3D in some form or another, you possibly know this.
But the true location I went to visit that is available by sail from Portmagee village in Ireland was the Skellig Island.
And I guess the fresh air, the experience and that bit of extra time in the remote village with the most amazing sea food was ground-breaking to fully understand CGFX shaders.
This was the result of my efforts.
And the skin, lighting and metal shaders all look great.
And more importantly I could play-blast and export computer graphics sequences without waiting for the offline rendering systems such as Mental Ray or V-Ray.
These great yet I never got a chance to fall in love with hardware dependent architecture.
Finally I am currently investigating Marmoset and Substance in order to pre-create more advanced verions of materials for the scene in order to enhance the visual aesthetic of the 3D project publish to SketchFab.
And the setup for the next milestone is to make the add to the material setup for the SketchFab scene to have the digital head in it. Not just the mask and the cybernetic suit.
And try to introduce transperent materials, metals, rubber, leather, and possibly some glowing material for the enrichment of the visual quality on the aspect of the creative design.
I would not go into the detail how to use CGFX shaders in Maya, to setup the pre-built plugin and connect those .cgfx text files to visualise the material properties.
Simply because with the sources I have mentioned previously it is very straight forward.
Plus there is plenty of information online for how to get started.
This area of CGFX shader developent since the introduction of the Viewport 2.0 has been studied but not so much developed further as other shaders.
And with this entry I have simply wanted to outline how finding this technology has changed my perception that my project actually has the chance to be rendered one day.
And hopefully even viewed in Vritual Reality.
Stay tuned and check my SketchFab page.
Cheers, Oleg
P.S. Thank you for reading the post.
