Material Libraries

[cjwidd]

I was hoping I could ask the community about material libraries and what your approach is? For example, there are so many ways to source textures / materials nowadays, e.g. Quixel, Substance, Siger Studio, Friendly Shade, Corona Mat Lib, etc.

Do you use any of these services for your rendering needs, or is there another service that I did not mention above?

I am in the process of constructing a material library for my own work, but I thought I should ask the community for advice before I proceed.

[iancamarillo]

- Corona Material Library
- https://corona-renderer.com/resources/materials
- Megascans
- Substance, although I bake them because I've had too many instability issues with the plugin
- https://3dsky.org/

and it's much easier to fix paths with:
https://www.colinsenner.com/scripts/relink-bitmaps

[cjwidd]

Right, so I mentioned Corona Material Library, Quixel Megascans, and Substance in the post, but I did not know 3dsky was being considered as an alternative(?)

[romullus]

It's kinda hard to understand what your question is about. Do you want to know where to source good materials/textures? Are you interested in how to efficiently construct materials from texture ssourced ets? Or maybe you're looking for ways how to organise your material libraries?

[cjwidd]

Sure, let me expand on my original post.

I see archviz renders on the gallery and assume that the studios producing these images rely on a material library to texture their scenes. I assume this because it would be too inefficient to have to recreate any given material from scratch any time it is needed.

There are services that address this problem by offering subscriptions to material libraries, for example Substance, Quixel, Siger, etc. Quixel doesn't have a lot of archviz textures, Substance is too buggy at the moment, and Siger probably is being used by some studios.

So my question is, how are the professional archviz studios populating their material libraries? Is it from a service, like Siger, or have they simply generated a large number of custom materials from years of experience, and they only use Quixel or Substance to update those materials from time to time when they need to?

[balatschaka]

CMPP - is reliable but somewhat slow interface.
Project Manager - has tons of cool ass features for model/texture/material managing. Has sweet little things like the possibility to host the material database on your qnap sql server. It did tho always feel a bit unstable.
Connecter - last time I checked it didn't have the possibility to manage materials. If it could, this could be the winner.
Vizpark Material Manager - Does someone use it? Any experience?

The rest you mention is not directly connected to your 3d software and is used for texture creation, not material management.

[romullus]

Connecter - last time I checked it didn't have the possibility to manage materials. If it could, this could be the winner.

Don't know when you last time checked Connecter, but you might want to check it again, because it manages materials very well. Its developement is very active and devs are listening to the community's feedback. I never tried any other assets manager, so i can't compare them, but for the price, Connecter is unbeatable.

[cjwidd]

I ultimately went with Siger Studio. They have a pretty strong base library to source materials from - comparable to Corona Material Library - and the ability to create custom shelves with previews.