Creating Believable Materials - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 186

terial needs to evoke and, where possible, photographic or drawn reference material
that would help clarify the written description.
While this may sound like an awful lot of work to go through before we even get star-
ted on the real work of material creation, in this instance, you are going to have to
trust me when I say that time spent on this particular aspect of the texturing process
at this stage of the production, can and will save hours of head scratching and test
renders further down the line.
Which of these two approaches we decide to take on any given project will probably
depend on quite a number of external factors.
For instance, we may ask what is the type of project on which we are working? Is it a
personal skill building exercise or is it a show piece being created for one of our most
important clients? What is the situation regarding available time? Do we only have a
few days before deadline, or have we budgeted well and so still have a reasonable
amount of time in which to get the required work not only done but done well?
Whichever approach we do settle on, one absolutely critical aspect of the initial tex-
turing phase is that we must budget time for our research. We will need to gather
as much reference material and real-world experience with our subject materials as
we possibly can. If we are, as is the case here, adding materials to an architectural
space that has a number of objects inhabiting it, then we again need to find some
real-world examples of both the space and objects and go visit them. We need to
walk around and more importantly, wherever possible, photograph every relevant as-
pect of the environment. At the very least, we should be taking down lots of notes
and supplementing them with simple sketches or diagrams wherever that will help
clarify a concept or point.
Now, you are probably thinking that you have heard all of this advice already. Didn't
we cover all of these thoughts in connection with our lighting work? Well, yes we did.
However, while lighting and materials in a scene are hugely interdependent, I would
very strongly recommend that, whenever possible, the reference gathering phases
for each of these unique aspects of an environment should be done in separate
passes. They could even be completed on different days so as to keep them both
separate and fresh in our minds.
If time constraints mean that we do have to do them on the same day, be sure to
take a break between each of the reference gathering passes, perhaps taking the