Varying Materials Using A Single Shader

Eugene — Mon, 25 May 2009 03:44:22 +0000

Nothing ground breaking here, but for someone who is into neat little tricks to control shaders, I thought this was worth showing. What the video covers is a way to vary the materials on a single object using a single shader (differing from the usual method of using multiple shaders for different pieces of an object). I’ll leave it at that and let the video do the talking. I’m starting to record at my screen’s native resolution (1680 x 1050) which ups the video size but I like seeing big videos. I’m also posting these on Vimeo which I think is nice to have since you’re not always on a machine that you can download videos on.

Note: Video re-done on 5/25/2009. I thought it could be cleaner and more focused on production nuances so I re-recorded it.

Image Planes Part 2 (An Occlusion Plane)

Eugene — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:39:44 +0000

Okay, so I went a bit off the track on this one. It’s loosely an image plane video and more of a “how to do an occlusion pass inside a shader then put it in a plane” video. So I’m not sure if I should keep it under the “image plane” heading or create some new one. Either way, this topic was a weird one I was wrestling so I did a lot of forum searches and made lots of mistakes (basically writing my VEX poorly). So I thought I would at least show my results so people could see what I found. What’s made this more interesting is looking into the different occlusion functions and trying to figure out why they differ and what they really give you.

Edit: In this video I use a subtract node to subtract the occlusion output from a constant float (1). Houdini user Jason M. pointed out that I could have used the compliment VOP instead which does the same thing in one node rather than the two I used. So remember that the compliment VOP is around!

geneome » Materials

Varying Materials Using A Single Shader

Image Planes Part 2 (An Occlusion Plane)