Knock out fractal bump

[hurricane]

Hi,

Can anyone point me in the right direction please, I'm having some issues. . .

I have a procedural fractal noise, that I'm using as a bump on an item, I want to flatten it out using a texture so that the bump noise does not appear in certain areas using a texture map. i.e. the texture map neutralises the fractal bump. I don't seem to be able to do this.

Does anyone have any tips for this please?

Help much appreciated!

Mat.

[S. Houtzager]

I usually take a modeling approach to this type of issue. I would model the label geometry as a separate piece.

Also, reactive shaders can be controlled so that they only affect something that is a certain color below it.

[hurricane]

I usually take a modeling approach to this type of issue. I would model the label geometry as a separate piece.

Also, reactive shaders can be controlled so that they only affect something that is a certain color below it.

Hi, Thanks for the reply!

Yes, sometimes I use geometry but this would be very tricky in this case as the text would have to be made around a circle and tapered and fitted very closely . . . It also has some very fine areas and has to stand up to quite a large render. The geometry would have to be extremely high res.

I've got around the issue by just using some noise on the texture maps in photoshop (see attached) but I would like to know if there is a way of doing it using procedural fractal noise, maybe I'm just not getting something!

It would be nice if you could in some way layer the bump channel to multiply or screen over the procedural to neutralise or add to it.

[bwcc]

I have wished for this too. I'm not sure if it's possible, but it would be nice to be able to place a texture map to be used as a mask. It could then be selected as an alpha mask for any map in any channel. Being able to select it as mask for a procedural shader would even better.

brian

[RichardJoly]

... but it would be nice to be able to place a texture map to be used as a mask....

brian

I probably don't get your comment right. You can use a texture map as a mask. It can be attached as an alpha channel or a grayscale image. Select "use as mask" for the alpha channel of the image in the "Filter" tab of the "Diffuse" tab. Gees, that sounds complicated...:dodgy:

[hurricane]

I probably don't get your comment right. You can use a texture map as a mask. It can be attached as an alpha channel or a grayscale image. Select "use as mask" for the alpha channel of the image in the "Filter" tab of the "Diffuse" tab. Gees, that sounds complicated...:dodgy:

Yes, this works for adding a pixel based map over another pixel based map, i.e. it's like a decal with the alpha channel as a cutout, but is there any way to do this over a procedural texture in the Geometry/bump maps list. i.e. there is a procedural fractal shader under a pixel based bump map where the values on the pixel based map can be added or subtracted from the values of the procedural fractal shader underneath it, this way I could apply a fractal shader to create a bump over the whole of the geometry, then flatten it out where the type sits. . . and you thought your's sounded complicated!!

[barnabythebear]

Hiya,

Have you tried playing about the reactive version of the Fractal Shader?

You could place a texture map under this shader and set the reactive bump appropriately to the texture map you're using to 'mask' the areas as necessary.

ta

nige

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Hurricane,

I just did a simple project to you showing How to solve your problem with a Reactive Shader.

Hope it helps

Reactive.zip

Thanks

Tom

[bwcc]

I probably don't get your comment right. You can use a texture map as a mask. It can be attached as an alpha channel or a grayscale image. Select "use as mask" for the alpha channel of the image in the "Filter" tab of the "Diffuse" tab. Gees, that sounds complicated...:dodgy:

Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about. I know you can use an alpha that is saved with an image, but I want to place a separate image that can be used as a mask for any other placed map.

For example, an object might have maps placed for diffuse, specular, reflectivity and luminance. All the maps could be placed without masks. A separate image would be placed and designated as a mask. Then for each placed map, you could select the independently placed mask image to mask the map for each channel. This would allow you independently place the map and the mask and not have to go back to PhotoShop to constantly adjust the mask every time you adjust the placement of the maps.

It would also be very cool if the mask could also be selected to work with shaders.

brian

[hurricane]

Hi, thanks for all the help! Especially the file Tomas, it was interesting to see this method . . .

Yes, in fact that was really my problem as the light areas that you would use for the reactive shader bright areas, were not in the diffuse tab, in fact they were reflections with reflection maps this is because I was making a kind of reflective varnish effect (a uv varnish), so I was unable to use a reactive shader as there was no diffuse bright area. Perhaps there is an opportunity here for a kind of global mask . . . something that any map could reference . . . is that making sense? Could be a nice touch . . . or maybe just the ability for procedurals to use independent masks from other textures . . . then of course there are decals, I've often thought this would be useful. So we would have a parent base material with child decals that appear in the same materials tab . . . (just thought I'd throw that curve ball in!!)

I thought I was probably just not getting something but there does seem to be room for improvement here.

Thoughts? :idea: