Reflection Ignoring Surface Layers?

Started by WAS, July 25, 2018, 02:52:45 AM

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WAS

Quote from: Matt on July 27, 2018, 02:20:30 PM
Thanks for the clarification.

When "Enable colour" is on, the surface layer becomes an opaque layer with that colour, rendered with diffuse shading. Sometimes you want to use a Surface Layer to produce displacement only, without affecting shading, or simply as a container for children, so we have this checkbox to allow to you turn it off and make it transparent. Perhaps it's not very intuitive. Maybe worth noting that you can enable Luminosity independently, even if Enable Colour is off.

Child layers which are themselves opaque should be blocking out reflections even if the parent layer is transparent. But they are affected by the mask and constraints of the parent, so this may have been reducing their opacity.

Aha! And with a mask originating from scalar, that has been clamped, it's "White" is not actually perfectly solid white. Getting it now.

And of course, reflections being so strong, they'll really stand out.

Dune

#16
QuoteThere will always be a line where it transitions. The same is true with SSS shapes, and Distance Shader.
That is because there's clamping, IMO, and hence I often use a smooth step scalar. In distance shader you can unclamp, but that's not possible everywhere.
In fact, for smooth transitions (like minimum altitude) the first thing to change should be the fuzzy zone, I think. Making it a smooth step instead of a hard step.

WAS

Quote from: Dune on July 28, 2018, 02:26:27 AM
QuoteThere will always be a line where it transitions. The same is true with SSS shapes, and Distance Shader.
That is because there's clamping, IMO, and hence I often use a smooth step scalar. In distance shader you can unclamp, but that's not possible everywhere.
In fact, for smooth transitions (like minimum altitude) the first thing to change should be the fuzzy zone, I think. Making it a smooth step instead of a hard step.

Yeah, I'm aware of clamping. Even without clamp it still has a fall-off. The same is true with unclamped noises and trying to get smooth transitions between colours. With noise colours best I've come up with is bringin contrast way down, like 0.125 and it'll be pretty smooth, but than you loose a lot of shape definition so it's not a real work-around.