Blender and Lux materials of shapeways materials?

Did anybody create a virtual equivalent of the shapeways materials for blender or luxrender? They would be swell for accurate pre-renderings .

Cheers,

Erik

A accurate material would be great, and the idea of a render with material added would be pretty cool also.

Personally I use a tweaked version of the material I found here.
http://matrep.parastudios.de/index.php?action=view&mater ial=412-styrox&fc=4

I just scale down the texture to be much smaller to represent the grain of WSF, but it's far from perfect.

Haven't tried, but the materials look simple enough. I'll try making one and see.

:confused Tried making the strong white material in blender based on the photos. Still not as I wanted it to be. Needs more tweaking. Try making one in lux next.



Any suggestions?

Our server renderer runs in Blender, and we've released all our files under a Creative Commons license:

https://shapeways.com/blog/archives/404-Shapeways-releases-Bl ender-rending-files-under-Creative-Commons-License.html

Feel free to explore & improve them! We'd be very happy to check out any contributions (materials, lighting, even new background scenes).

We don't use Lux by the way. I think it would slow our renderer down a lot. It would, wouldn't it?

Cheers,

Bart

I have tried the command line (WindowsXP) indicating the path for all the files and I get an error:

Compiled with Python version 2.6.2.
Checking for installed Python... got it!
Error caught, exiting.
(During less than a second I see a small black "Image" window.)

I suppose that the result is the same opening the .blend file with Blender and clicking the Render button (no error this way).

And about the texture, I think the lights used in the template increase the contrast between lit and shaded zones. That helps to see the geometry of the models, but it seems artificial to me in the case of the WSF material. Maybe the material should be tested with a "real" environment, for example:

- Take a photo of a real WSF object in an interior scene.
- Make photos of that scene, without the object, to obtain a Light Probe (HDR image).
- Use the light probe in Blender to test the material and compare the resulting render with the image taken to the real model.

The problem with this technique is that renders take more time than usual (Ambient Occlusion + Raytrace). More info about HDRi and Blender:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/HDRi