Ive got a question about a material I am trying to create. I need to make photorealistic renders of a soccer goal and I’m really struggling with the net of the soccer goal. I’ve tried a few different methods but nothing seems to work. This is the closest I’ve come so far but yet another difficulty I’m hoping you can help me with.
The steps I took in advance to create the material;
Re-tesselate, Split Object Surface (separated the sides and center part), Unwrap-UV
Ive made the hexagon net pattern in Illustrator and I’am using this as an opacity map and the displace map to create the thickness of the net. When using this texture map as a displace map the ‘bottom’ of the material gets very weird. Does anyone have any experience with this issue and is there a solution? Thanks!
Interesting way of trying to approach the net material. I personally probably would think creating actual geometry for the net to be rounded instead of square off as you have it currently in the modeling software of your choice instead of going at it with squared off geometry. Then probably use like the Real Cloth material to simulate the weave of the net material.
If you are set on using the displacement method, I am not really sure what the displacement is doing there, but the jaggedness is due to the triangle size of the displacement being to big. Try maybe 0.001 to start off with to see how much it improves. If it is still too jagged, keep decreasing the size of the triangles till it looks smooth. If you are going to like 0.000001 triangles without much improvement, it could be the texture map you are using. For whatever reason, the way keyshot’s displacement works is that if your lines are too sharp, the software tries to hard to create the sharp line and creates the jaggedness. I often bring the texture into photoshop and add a small guassian blur to blur the edges a bit, as the software has an easier time creating sharp lines from blurred and less perfect edges, so it can map out its own idea of the straight line.
I would give that a try first if you don’t want to attempt to remodel the net from scratch. Otherwise, I’d even remove the displacement on the net material and bring that into a modeling software as a base. If you were using Blender, I would probably extrude the mesh, add a bevel modifier, and subdivide if necessary to create a more organic net.
Like Oliver says, I would also try a different approach. But it also depends on how the end result has to look and if it’s a close-up or more general image.
I’m not sure what the displacement will add in this example and I wonder if you will get rid of the jagged edges. I think it’s easier to model it and use a detailed opacity mask for the holes and a bump for the net. Still, it really depends on the end result you’re aiming for. If it would be a really macro kind of close up of a part of the net I think the only good option is to model that part actually in 3D.
If it’s more a distance thing and the entire structure is not obvious in the net I think I would go for an opacity map after having the shape with a nice UV (think that’s important although you might get a good enough result with box mapping.
Hi
First of all, thank you for looking at my issue and trying to help me!
As you suggested i wanted to try a different approach. I’ve asked my colleague (who draw the 3D model) to model the hexagon patern into the net. That worked out fine so i used the ‘Rounded Edges’ feature to make the edges more rounded so it looks more like a real net (IMG 1 & 2). At the start that seemed to work perfectly but when i added the net material (without the texture maps) to the net the rounded edges disappeared… When using a more simple material (like a regular plastic) the rounded edge would not disappear.
I’ve tried dismantling my material point by point to figure out at what stage the rounded edge would disappear but i could not find the issue unfortunately.
So i had another idea; ‘lets create the rounded edges in the 3D model’. So i asked my colleague again to try this and he created a net with the hexagon patern and rounded edges. Perfect! so i thought… after i imported the new 3D file into KeyShot i noticed that the net did not have rounded edges, again (Just like IMG 1). Is there something I’am missing or doing wrong?
That’s interesting, what if you export the model as fbx from Solidworks?
Maybe, but that’s hard to see it will also help if you do ‘edit normals’. Not sure how KS will handle the imported file but maybe it helps if you give the geometry new normals so it will get a more round appearance.
