Combining surface layers with default shader

Started by bigben, February 01, 2007, 05:27:25 PM

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bigben

I've come to a brick wall... time for some guru help perhaps?  ;)

I've found that if you apply a surface layer to an Xfrog tree (birch in this example) you can get a unique colour for each "leaf"  This is pretty cool in theory but I get squares instead of masked leaves.

I can also get a coloured leaf using a default shader with an image mask, but this only gives me a uniform colour across the entire tree. I got some shading by modifying the objects leaf texture image and using it to set luminosity which also makes it look more realistic. 

Can anyone give me some pointers on whether it's possible to combine both? (and how to) I tried setting the surface layer as the input to the default shader but that didn't do anything.

Sample images and TGDs in my reply to "Something different -- Xfrog Modification. " in Shared Files
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=518.msg5466#msg5466

rcallicotte

I'm not sure if it's because I just got home from work, just drink a beer, or just don't know that is keeping me from being able to even think about a good answer.  I'll look at it again tomorrow. 

I think you're getting into it, though.  Sounds fun.

;D
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

helentr

Hi,

If you look at the snow tree discussion, you will see that the trick is to insert your surface layer between the default shader for the leaf and the multi shader for the tree.
Go to node view, choose the object, right click on it and go to the internal network. Right click on an empty space and create the shader you want. Then connect it as shown on the screenshot below. This doesn't change the opacity as you can see from the example images. It is not so pretty from close - it would look better if you altered the colors of the image in an image editor. But for an overview it does add variety.

Helen

bigben

Thanks Helen. I was missing the internal network bit. I'll give it a try later.

bigben

OK. Overkill on the colour for demonstration purposes only.  ;D

[attachthumb=#1]

As mentioned, I was using surface shaders rather than a power fractal.

[attachthumb=#2]

Note that in this case I used 3 surface layers. The first adds no colour to the render at all. I noticed that i was only getting the child layer appearing so I simply added another surface layer and modified the first child layer to be what I wanted for the first.  There's a lot of tweaking that can be done with the fractal breakup scale on the last child layer. It is possible to get nice patterns on an individual leaf.

There's a bit more tweaking to go but this is a pretty good starting point. I've attached the TGD below. Any further tweks will be posted in the original topic

rcallicotte

I feel unneeded now.   :'(

;D

Glad you got it figured out.  It is definitely not something I've worked with yet.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

bigben