20.16.0 - new materials & other nodes, tonemappings, pinhole lens

Version 20.16.0 is up on the builds page.

This version includes various fixes and new nodes, most notably three new material types — two “uber” types, and one PBR type for use with PBR texture sets.

NOTE: the Principled & Uber materials are not yet set in stone, and may be adjusted based on feedback from this build. This means that if you use them, files you create may not be fully compatible in the next build, but even in this case the differences may not be too troublesome.

PBR Material

The PBR material builds materials automatically, from commonly-available PBR texture sets, such as those from CC0 Textures. You may choose either a .zip file containing a texture set, or (any) one of the textures from a set that is not zipped.

Though such materials are fully specified by their textures, the PBR material does allow you to make an overall adjustment to specularity, set normal/bump map options, and connect a texform to alter UV mapping.

Principled Material

The Principled material is a simple, yet flexible monolithic material (as opposed to Bella’s core materials, which you build from various components), which can be used to create many different types of materials.

This is done by including (by weight values) various of four different sub-components: the base, specular, transmissive, and subsurface.

By default it creates a plastic type material:

To change this to metallic, just increase the Metallic attribute:

Or disable Base & Specular, and enable the Transmission component, to produce a glass material:

Finally, use the Subsurface component to create a material with subsurface scattering:

Uber Material

The Uber material is similar to the Principled material, but exposes far more attributes (and an extra layer component between the substrates and the specular), for much more control.

Color Blend

The Color Blend node (not yet exposed in Rhino) allows mixing together any color sources, such as procedural and file-based textures, using blend modes similar to what you find in a Photoshop-type application.

For instance, here we see a cheshire cat with alpha, normal blended over a grid texture:

Tonemapping

This build also adds two new preset modes for the Filmic tonemapping node, based on UC2 and ACES tonemappings. Following are some comparisons of the various tonemappings.

Default Reinhard:

Filmic – UC2:

Filmic – ACES:

Filmic – custom:

Pinhole lens

This build adds a new Pinhole lens (a lens with no depth of field) mode to the Bella camera. It appears in the camera, rather than as a separate lens type, in order to make it easy to quickly switch it on/off.

Pinhole lens off/on: