Hi all,
I never found material libraries particularly useful.
In my view, things like texture quality, final render size, personal taste, etc vary largely and materials from most libraries are never really a perfect fit. That said, I do understand the convince to “just drop something in” and move on, but that almost never looks any good.
Everything looks good on a shader ball!
I think it would be a lot more useful for everybody, if the Corona team posts a “material scene”. For example a interior/ exterior arch-viz scene with high quality materials applied. This would give everyone a good starting point and the ability to dissect materials, understand how they are correctly applied, how the scene is lit and quickly experiment with variations. A scene like this could grow over time when new shaders etc become available.
To give an example, to this day I’m not really happy with the look of my stainless steel kitchen appliances. Of course I can make a stainless steel material or get one from a lib, but when applied, it lacks realism. Missing variation in anisotropy, subtle fingerprints, dents, etc. If I had a scene where I can see how a pro builds/stacks materials and I can see the rendered results, that would help me a lot more than 50 “different” metals from a lib.
This could even be a forum feature, if a user believes he/she can improve the scene, to upload their variation.
Of course not everybody here is in arch-viz, but the same principle applies.
Maybe I missed the point and this thread is not about improving your skills…
