This page provides information about the Flakes 2 material layer for the Generic materials in V-Ray for SketchUp.
Overview
The Flakes 2 material layer is created by adding a Flakes 2 layer on top of a Generic material and cannot be found in the Creation menu of V-Ray Asset Editor. Applying the Flakes 2 material as a layer provides flexibility in creating advanced materials.
UI Path
An Add Layer button is provided for some V-Ray materials, including Generic. You can select an additional layer that can add up to the appearance of the material. Note that the added layers can be removed and rearranged, as shown on the Materials page.
The context options of the Color Slot allow to Copy and Paste a color from one color slot to another, as well as to reset the color selection.
A Reset option is provided in the context menu of each Number Slider. You can reset the slider value to the default one.
Parameters
Color – Specifies the color of the metal flakes.
Glossiness – The glossiness of the metal flakes. It is not recommended to set this above 0.9 because it may produce artifacts.
Density – Controls the number of flakes for a certain area. Lower values produce fewer flakes and higher values produce more flakes. Set this to 0 to produce a material without flakes.
Size – Controls the size of the flakes relative to the distance between them. Higher values produce bigger flakes and lower values produce smaller flakes.
Orientation – Controls the orientation of the flakes relative to the surface normal. When this is 0.0, all flakes are perfectly aligned with the surface. When it is 1.0, the flakes are rotated completely randomly with respect to the normal. Values above 0.5 are not recommended because they can produce artifacts.
Orientation Tail – Controls the transition from highlighted areas to non-highlighted areas.
Random Color – Sets colors from the specified map to the flakes in a random pattern. Only the U (horizontal) axis is sampled for colors (the bottom part of an mage).
Mapping / UV – Specifies the method for mapping the flakes. Specifies the mapping channel for the flakes when the Mapping method is set to Mapping Channel.
UV Scale – Controls the scale of the flakes structure, when the Mapping type is set to Mapping Channel.
Triplanar Scale – Scales the entire flake structure, when the Flake mapping is set to Triplanar.
Map Size – Internally the material creates several bitmaps to store the generated flakes. This parameter determines the size of the bitmaps. Lower values reduce RAM usage but may produce noticeable tiling in the structure. Higher values require more RAM, but tiling is reduced. Be careful when using the Directional filtering method because it may quickly take up gigabytes of RAM for larger map sizes.
Seed – Sets the random seed for the flakes. Changing this produces different flake patterns.
