Matcap materials store information about material properties and the environment. This way, you can apply it to a model and it will look 'realistic' even without additional lighting. They are a super helpful tool while modelling or sculpting, and you can create your own! Learn how in this tutorial by CG Masters.
Lee Salvemini writes:
Matcaps: Good for modeling/sculpting... Good for animating!? Absolutely, if you can customize them! In this tutorial we go through making our own. I'm using them to see my scene and characters better in the viewport for an animatic/animation stage of a short film.
All the best,
Lee
15 Comments
Reflection mapping is not a way to get a matcap. Normal mapping is - the tutorial is incorrect.
I found here a very nice setup for both BI and Cycles: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/39528/matcap-materials-as-a-material-for-render
Hi John!
You're absolutely right that for GLSL normal mapping an applied texture works fantastically. I was keen to keep multitexture shading mode in the viewport, and not mess with materials and textures too much come render time.
For me this allowed enough flexibility with the quick UV reflection map, not tied to the shader directly, an alternate use of matcap materials purely for animation visual difference. Thanks for sharing this method which you're right could be considered the 'correct' application for a matcap, perfect for modeling/sculpting!
Cheers,
Lee
Did a quick double check, looks like luckily the UV reflection feature is the same.
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=94589 (Top is normal mapped render, below viewport with reflection uv image applied)
Very handy to have both at least, it gives more control for having a matcap in the viewport only, render-time or both. Thanks again for bringing this up as it can be very easy sometimes to go with a pipeline that seems to work, but could be done more efficiently or is more useful!
Cheers,
Lee
I see, so it turns out the UV editor's "reflection" mapping is in reality a normal mapping and not the same reflection mapping for material textures. Someone who designed this in Blender should get slapped over this:)
But still I wonder how is it possible your custom matcap is different than the matcap build-in as you show in the beginning of the video. They should be totally the same.
Hahah indeed. I have been using Blender since about 2.23, and this is just an old legacy naming of 'reflection' since it was used in a basic form for the Blender Game Engine. It might be worth updating!
You're right the mystery still remains of the difference in matcap viz, considering normal mapping and rendering had the same effect as my viewport mapping. I wonder if a slight 'ramp' was giving to give some shadow further back around an object, a slight gradient modification by one of the devs perhaps!
I'll keep an eye out and be sure to update as we find out more.
Cheers,
Lee
cool stuff. seems useful too. i do more still images but i think i could still make use of this especially since it doesn't just slap the same cap over everything. i'm certainly going to play around with it at least =P
1-Put a shpere aligned to a square camera.
2-Edit the sphere material.
3-Render.
contrary to the obvious meaning the title may have that isn't really what the video is about.
still a nice comment though since it's a concise how to that people will use with the techniques shared in the video.
Good comment? Include for a english-nob-speaker?
I whipped up the title for this one quickly and didn't realize the other context it would be taken, that creating matcaps from scratch was such a topic of interest! Just goes to show it reveals an extension to this tutorial to make your own :) I might do! Thanks again. -Lee
The very first sentence of the tutorial should have said: "This only works if you are using the Blender Internal renderer", since many people like me will not have used BI for years!
Sorry! I still use BI for animations due to the render speed, at least for more stylized productions :) I'll add an annotation -Lee
Hi,
I would like to see a tutorial about how to create the matcaps images.
So not how to set them up ( like in this video ) but how to create an image with that sphere in the center.
if you follow the link in the first comment ( http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/39528/matcap-materials-as-a-material-for-render ) and scroll down there an image showing the node setup to do it in cycles.
Hi,
these matcaps are useful for BI and also for BGE realtime graphics... I like it very much! And with the right set of coordinates you can use it in cycles too! On BlendSwap you can find a nice matcap-generator as blendfile.
Good luck!