Reactive Shading

[meester smeeth]

Hello there

Does anybody know an easy way to create a colour that will bleed from an objects edges that could then be used as a reactive colour? Exactly the same way as Shade Bevel would do when you ask it to show its colour. Shade Bevel will not work as my object is a skin and not a 3d object. For eg. I could say I have a network of roads and would like the area next to the kerbs to have more dirt than the centre. A large projection map would work, but hopefully there is an easier 'free' way. Shade Bevel would have been perfect if it was not a skin object.

Thanks

Al

[S. Houtzager]

Have you taken a look at weight maps? You paint a weight map along the edge and then use the color of the map as the reactive color. There is a video tutorial on Coloripium on the web site.

[gyroo]

the antiqua plugin (ex konkeptione now eias3d) would work if the roads were a separate object and the groung was finely meshed.

DaveW

[meester smeeth]

It looks like colourphium would only work with reactive shaders that have a selection in its dropdown menu that uses "model colours", such as Noise factory. I've used fractalnoiseR, which is without this option. I've painted a map in photoshop to indicate the areas and it works fine when it is used for bump, but when I ask for transparency, the map underneath is shown also. Would have hoped this reactive map would not be rendered as it's only to be used as the "drive" for the above shader?

[meester smeeth]

Here is an eg. of my problem. The drive layer has been painted in psd and is directly under my top layer which is fractal noise, with its low areas transparent.

Underneath the drive layer are other layers of fractal noise which are fine as they are. Is there a way for the drive layer to not display in the render?

I'm going to give the Colourphium/Noise factory thing a go, but good to see others thoughts on the above.

[Ian]

How do Al,

Colourphium/Noise is the way to go, you don't even need to use bump with noise factory, just use it's dirt settings. Reactive shading only works when the colours are on the vertices, so I don't think map based 'reactive shading' works... Not that I'm aware of anyway...

Antiqua would do it, but it's not free :)

Ian

[meester smeeth]

Howdy Mr Waters,

Yep, been using the Colourphium method and it works great. The map based way would work if the drive layer was aware it was one, then disappeared at render time. It would be worth fixing, having both methods would be useful I reckon.

Al

[Ian]

Completely agree with you there.

[RobK]

It would be really nice if shaders could just see the vertex colours in any strength map of an object.

Then you could just create some really nice complex shader effects without having to go outside and paint maps or re-import models with vertex colours.

This would be fatasic for complex organic shapes with a single skin and it would be a large step in the direction of Modo where you can effectively paint with procedurals.

For me this would be a big must buy feature.

Regards, Rob.