Working with materials and shaders.
I love the red granite one - I'd been thinking I should do one like that myself, but hadn't found the time. I assume it's procedural from what you've said?
Nice! Is that the default scene with only the materials added?
First thing I thought of was Preset Central, a Lightwave site: http://www.presetcentral.com/
They display presets like this: http://www.presetcentral.com/preset/71/ The basic display scene is for download which keeps the surfaces consistent with lighting, etc.
Maybe a TGcentral some day!
Judging from the way the red granite texture is stretched at the top and bottom of the sphere, I'm guessing it's image mapped.
Procedurally, it woldn't be hard to make examples '1' and '4' in TG.
'2' and '3', on the other hand, hmmm, I'm not so sure.
I'm pretty sure that these are simply image mapped TG spheres. If you'd care to tell me otherwise, Marc, I'll make you my new god! :D ;)
I do remember Volker Harun making some really beautiful Perlin noise renders with extremely complexed patterns, similar to example 3.
@dandelO,
These are image based textures. I will be creating some Procedural Shaders but, they will be Marble and other types such as Paint, Glass etc.
I'm not at the level where I can make complex patterned Procedural Shaders using nodes. However, I am trying to reach this point.
Here is another set of texture based materials.
When I really need a texture, I now use Blender and it's node based materials. It's very easy to build masks, displacement, bump maps, stc,; using the nodes. Then I just apply these to a plane if I need a bitmap.
The brick textures look really great. 8)