Defining a latex material - MODO Tutorial

- I'm now ready to start shading and texturing the shoe. And the first item in the scene that I want to start adding materials to is going to be sole. So to start with, I'm going to select it in the viewport. And if I want to locate the shaders that are already assigned to this item in the shader tree, all I need to do is to select the mesh, then right click over any part of it and that's going to open a menu. If I scroll down to the shader section, I can then see what materials are assigned to the mesh on the point at which I clicked. So I'm going to select it in the menu, and that will also automatically select the relevant material in the shader tree. And the first thing I'm going to do is to change the shading model from the default of physically based to principled. And that's just because the principled material has a few more features and is a bit more versatile. And in this case I want to create a fairly translucent latex like material. So the first step will be to decide what colors I want to use. So I'm going to open the image panel and I'm going to click on add clip, go to load image, and in the images sub folder of the exercise files, I'm going to locate the color palette.PNG file. And this is basically a color reference. It's the kind of color reference that you might get from a designer. And I'm going to base all of my color decisions on this palette. So I'm going to go back to the material's property tab and now I can click on the diffuse color properties to open the color picker, and I'm just going to drag it to pin it. And now I need to try and match the colors in the color palette. So this is the color that I'm aiming for, so that it start by making color in my color picker fully saturated. And then I'm just going to start moving the hue until I get a reasonably close match to what's in the color palette image. And then it's simply a case of just toying with the saturation and brightness until I get a much better match. And that seems pretty close if I compare this swatch to that one, I think I've got a very good match. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to save this swatch so that I can reuse it later. And to do that, all I need to do is just to grab the swatch from there and drag and drop it into the color presets. Then I'm going to dismiss the color picker. And I'm going to hit escape to just de-select the shoe. Let's reselect the material in the shader of tree. And let's zoom in a little and take a closer look at this material that I'm creating. So I know I want to create a relatively glossy latex. So the first thing I do is just to reduce the roughness to 30%. And now I think I need a more accurate preview of the material. So I'm going to use RayGL. Let's go to the viewport button, that's launch RayGL. I'm just going to drag the panel over here and pin it. And then I'm going to set to RayGL to full and take a look at the material. And at the moment it looks more like a mat rubber rather than a translucent latex. So I'm going to need to add some subsurface scattering in order to create the desired translucency. So I'll switch to the material transparency tab and I'm going to scroll down until I find the subsurface scattering settings, and I'm going to set the subsurface amount to 100%. And because I've set the subsurface amounts to 100%, it is now completely overriding the diffuse color. As you can see, the material has turned back to white and that's because it's being defined by the subsurface color. So when I click on the subsurface color to open the color picker, and I'm going to locate the preset color that I saved earlier and I just click on that to apply it as a subsurface color. And then I can dismiss the pop over. Now you'll notice that the material is a bit strange. There's this unevenness that we have here, looks like there's some kind of artifact. And what it is is the mesh that is directly behind this one is interfering with the subsurface scattering. It's very easy to fix that. All I need to do is to come over to this checkbox that says same surface only and tick it. And as you can see, that fixes all our problems. And with that done, I'm going to change one setting in the subsurface scattering properties. And that is just to reduce the front wetting to 25% to make the material more transparent and latex like. But as you can see, that also makes it a lot darker. And so to fix that, I'm going to click on the subsurface color once again, and I'm just going to drag the color palette above my reference colors. And I'm just going to tweak this color until what I see in the viewport is a closer match to this swatch that I have in my reference image. And with those tweaks, I think that the color that I have in a viewport is a pretty good match for this swatch here. So I'm going to dismiss the color picker and I'm going to set RayGL back to off, dismiss this pop over, and we're now ready to move on to the next stage.