Making a Velvet material for SuperFly

Making a velvet material for SuperFly is a very easy task, and yet, you can get amazing results. Actually, there is a node in the Poser Material Room that has all the functions already built in. If you have been involved in computer graphics for a few years, you know that making velvet materials required doing a lot of normal calculations in your materials, but now all that is done by our VelvetBsdf node.

To make a velvet material, first, go into the Material Room and create a VelvetBsdf node, connect it to the CyclesSurface’s Surface input, and set that node as the SuperFly Root, so it is used by SuperFly when rendering the surface that has the material applied to it.

The following image shows the image with the default settings (I am using SuperFly CPU mode to get the most “pure” version of the image).

If we decrease the value of the Sigma, this is what we get.

As you can see, decreasing the sigma makes the velvet effect more concentrated, but it causes dark areas to appear. How can we have a lighter looking object, while keeping the concentration of the velvet effect like that of the second image? Well, we can combine two Bsdf nodes for that, combining them with a MixClosure node.

And this is the result we get.

And for comparison, this is the result with just the PrincipledBsdf node that was created before, so you can see the difference between the two

As you can see, the velvet effect changes the appearance of the shader, even though part of the effect is lost. This is because the MixClosure node is basically combining them as if it was a LERP, so the mix factor of 0.5 means 50% of each material is combined. On the other hand, if we added an AddClosure node instead, like in the image below, the two shaders are combined in an additive way.

The image below shows the result using the AddClosure node. Using one or the other will depend on the effect you want to get.

Another thing you can do is change the color of the material. I changed the color for both the VelvetBsdf and PrincipledBsdf to a pink color, and added a noise generator for normal map.

This is the resulting image.

You can use different colors for both Bsdf nodes, though, and I’d argue it’s better to do it if you want to get interesting results. One of the properties of velvet is how it reacts to the light, making it look of a different color when it’s hit by light. The image shows what happens with a blue PrincipledBsdf and a greenish VelvetBsdf.

Poser’s SuperFly has a wide variety of shader nodes that you can use for different situations, such as the PrincipledBsdf, VelvetBsdf and the PrincipledHairBsdf node that we have used in the past. It is up to you to explore Poser 13’s advanced render capabilities and bring your work to the next level!

What kind of work do you do with Poser? How are you using Poser 13’s Hair Room to create your art? Share your thoughts in the Poser forums!

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Making a Velvet material for SuperFly

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