Rendering Time

[Matt Hallock]

A procedural material is a high definition material that uses multiple layers of maps, including bump, diffuse, mask, composite, blend, reflections, and much more. There's nothing else that it can be really.

[Lev]

Originally Posted by Matt Hallock

A procedural material is a high definition material that uses multiple layers of maps, including bump, diffuse, mask, composite, blend, reflections, and much more. There's nothing else that it can be really.

I dont know where you got that definition from. I was assuming you were referring to material that heavily uses procedural maps - maps generated in render time by the software. This is the standard definition as far as i know.

I guess looking back on the thread you thought that i was suggesting "baking" the bump, reflection, etc onto the diffuse texture, but that is not at all what i was talking about. I was talking about rendering the procedural maps (like fractal noise, marble texture, etc.) into a bitmap, so that software doesnt have to recalculate it all the time. This also works for multiple layers of maps (in most cases), so that software doesnt have to blend between 10 different stacked bitmaps all the time, but blends them once and stores the result, and then uses it during rendertime.

[JamesWu]

Procedural Textures are ones that are created mathematically at the time of rendering. While i may slow rendering down a bit it will not affect it by that much. The pro about bitmaps is that they are more detailed when made correctly(ei not just a repeating pattern like procedurals) but unfortunately they will fill your hard drive fast if they are high quality and resolution.