Have any of you tried lava in scenes? It's easy to get a "hot rocks" look with a luminous shader, but what about oceans of molten rock? Here's my solution: a procedural lava shader! It uses several power fractals all with the same seed but different colors plugged into a default shader connected to a surface layer. Now you can easily melt your favorite scene!
Very nice! I tried this as well some time ago, and came up with this. The hard part is to get the lava really glowing (shining light upon its surroundings), so I tried a reflective shader at the edges of the lava stream, but it didn't give the required result.
This is a voronoi rock base displacement on a fractal terrain, and a plane with the same fractal terrain (the lava), but without the voronoi displacement. If I remember right.
For glowing lava under low lighting conditions you could try to add a default shader as a child to the lava shader and let that control the diffuse colors and give it some luminosity.
Martin
The lava is controlled by a surface layer. The lava itself is actually a default shader with luminosity controlled by 2 PF nodes. The color is controlled by a single PF as well as the displacement. I'm pretty sure it would glow under low lighting. It sorta does cast light around itself because it's not just a sharp-edged layer, it's a very smooth-edged one so there's the effect of the surrounding rocks being almost the same temp as the lava. The rocks around those rocks are also very hot.
Quote from: TheBlackHole on December 25, 2009, 12:07:08 PM
The lava is controlled by a surface layer. The lava itself is actually a default shader with luminosity controlled by 2 PF nodes. The color is controlled by a single PF as well as the displacement. I'm pretty sure it would glow under low lighting. It sorta does cast light around itself because it's not just a sharp-edged layer, it's a very smooth-edged one so there's the effect of the surrounding rocks being almost the same temp as the lava. The rocks around those rocks are also very hot.
Oops sorry, it was meant for Dune, but thanks anyway for explaining how and why how you did it here :)
Cheers,
Martin
Thanks to you both for explaining.
---Dune