Category Archives: Material Reference

OpenSurfaces

The folks at Cornell university have created a sort of platform for studying materials and textures, keeping it completely open for public contribution. It’s a big database of photos, but where contributors have isolated each material and inputted the various material properties as close as possible.

It looks a little too basic to be useful for any serious hyper-real material studies, but it’s a decent starting point for basic material properties such as diffuse and glossy intensities, roughness and colour.

OpenSurfaces
(Database download link is at the bottom, though the papers are the top are quite interesting)

Material Study

To kick off this cycles/rendering blog, here’s a material study! (i.e. I got bored and took some photos of random crap)

The idea is to build up a library of reference images that use similar lighting so that it’s easy to study different objects and their materials for subtle differences. This being the first, it’s pretty amateur.

Exposures are obviously adjusted, but white balance and lighting is consistent. In future I’d like to make a more isolated “studio” or sorts, with a proper backdrop, measurements and one of them colour cards you buy to make sure your white balance is correct and the lighting is a neutral colour. Which would mean I need some proper lights, since the ones used here are all sorts of different shades of yellow.