Vue Tutorial 1

The following tutorial will help you understand how to achieve a realistic wet pavement effect in Vue. I use Vue 9 Infinite, but this method should work in just about any version of Vue. I also will touch on some basics of using bitmaps as the basis of your textures in Vue.

The wet pavement material we'll be dissecting can be seen here in my image
called "One Evening".

As you can see, the Pavement material is a mixed material. A shiny, reflective pavement surface with a little bump and variable reflection, a puddle material that uses a raindrop ring bump, transparency and reflection. The materials are blended with an alpha map.

As an aside; I find it very useful to name materials, objects, and other presets as I create them in the scene. It can be tedious, but it's a good habit — it makes things much easier to manage, especially with complex images.

So, let's start by looking at each separate material, then I'll show you how to make the alpha map to combine them.

The Pavement layer uses a mapped picture (bitmap, I usually call them texture maps). This particular bitmap is seamless, meaning when it tiles across a large area, there are no visible seams at the edges. When you use bitmaps, it's important to adjust the scale and mapping method to prevent it from tiling (or repeating) too many times. Even seamless bitmaps will look bad if tiled over a large area, because of the repeating patterns.

Also be sure to use bitmaps that are an appropriate resolution for your renders. I tend to render my work very large, so my bitmaps are also pretty large. This one is what I'd call medium size at 1024 x 1024. Just as a rule of thumb, if you plan to render your final image at 2000 pixels across, then none of your bitmaps should be lower than half of that final resolution. If they are lower, they can look pixelated when rendered, and that can absolutely ruin an otherwise perfect image. Higher resolution is better, but too high can slow your render time.

Render some area renders at final resolution to see how your bitmaps look, and adjust them accordingly. The smallest files you can get away with will help your scenes to load, render, and save more quickly.

I adjusted the overall color of the pavement bitmap to suit the nighttime atmosphere of my image. This works best for slight color or brightness shifts, if you need your map to be a completely different color, try the Color blend/Color mask option, or edit your map in an image editing program.

Here's the Pavement bump. It uses the same bitmap for bump as we used for color, just a grayscale version. When you're using bitmap based bump, go easy. Less is more, usually. Too high a bump on a bitmap texture can look odd and pixelated.

Procedural textures (textures that you generate inside Vue that are math based and scale infinitely), are much more forgiving if you want a very rough looking surface.

Displacement goes one step beyond, actually altering the geometry of the surface to create physical bumps. It's a beautiful effect, especially on organic surfaces, but can and will slow your render times significantly.

Above is the settings I used for the highlights. Water, even very dirty water, is always very shiny, but the brightness depends on the light in the scene and how murky your water is. I wanted to make sure the pavement looked very wet in my dark scene, so I turned both settings up.

The highlights on most solid and opaque objects are isotropic, meaning the light gathers in one spot regardless of where the light source is. Anisotropic highlights scatter the light, usually in a line, across the plane that receives the most light. Fur and hair create anisotropic highlights, as do many other surfaces where light gets bounced around; like brushed metals, skin, and wax.

Here's the reflection settings. Because of the low angle of the camera, and the dark atmosphere, I set the reflectivity very high so the pavement would look wet.

The variable reflectivity setting helps add realism, because on an actual chunk of pavement, some of the material would be smoother from wear and thus be more smooth and reflective, and some would be rougher, and less reflective. I chose a simple filter with subtle differences to achieve a very slightly irregular reflective pattern.

The blurred reflection setting is useful for brushed or otherwise slightly rough surfaces that still reflect, like brushed metal, or some variants of water. The pavement here needs to look like it actually has a layer of water on top of it, and not just like the pavement itself was reflective, so I wanted clear reflections, which makes the surface look smooth, like water.

Now on to the second part of the mixed material, the material that makes the puddles. I used a basic calm water mat to begin with, and changed the procedural color to white. The sky in this image is black, and therefore the standing water won't appear to have any color.

The bump on the puddle material is what really sells the idea that it's raining in the scene. This bump map - a bitmap image - is part of the Incredibly Lush Raindrop Ring materials pack available from Linda Daireaux on Cornucopia. It's a fantastic set.

Again, I went easy on the bump. It didn't take much to suggest that the puddles had raindrop ripples. Understatement is a good thing in creating 3D images. You'd be surprised how delicately you can suggest something visually, and the viewer's brain fills in the gaps and it is completely believable and realistic in the final image.

Finally, highlights, reflection, and transparency for the puddles. Basic settings, slightly softer reflection and highlights than the pavement settings because the puddle surface would be moving and not static.

It had been raining for a while in the scene, so the puddles would be very transparent and very clear. Fresh puddles are usually dirtier as they kick up surface dirt.

Now let's look at how the puddles get mapped onto the pavement material, through the use of an alpha map.

You can see in the image above, I used an irregular map with flat spots for the puddles. The dark areas show the underlying material (the pavement), and the lighter areas create a mask so the puddle material will show through only in those places.

To create an alpha channel, you can just double click on the alpha sphere, and choose from one of the Vue presets, or you can right click, edit the map, and create your own.

This is the map I used for the puddles. In the noise mode, I chose a flat, clumps pattern that looked to me like random puddles. I needed sharp edges and not a blurred pattern, because the puddles don't fade into the pavement, they have finite edges where they begin and end.

Blurry patterns are nice for things like moss growing on rocks, or dirt on a wall.. things where you want a soft, graduated change between materials.

The areas of pale gray and white in the original noise channel would have basically covered my pavement with puddles of varying opacities.

I wanted individual puddles, so I selected the filter node and chose an inverse saturation filter of about 60%. This locks out all of the lighter colors in the pattern and gives me the result I wanted, which was a few puddles on a solid field.

Instead of the noise node, you'd choose the texture map node, which is highlighted in yellow at the left. Then in the dialog box below, also highlighted you can navigate to the bitmap of your choice.

That's how I created the wet pavement in my image, and some general ideas about how to use the material editor to create some realism in your images. Below are 3 materials for you to play with, the wet pavement, and two variants of the dry pavement. Thanks, and Enjoy!