I know people typically use a gradient texture with either a layer weight or fresnel, whatever that means, but that doesn’t typically work well for organic shapes.
How do you transition shaders along an arbitrary area? Do you use a UV-mapped image as a layer weight, then draw a black or white portion where you want the other material to show or is there any conventional technique like that?
Do you use a UV-mapped image as a layer weight, then draw a black or white portion where you want the other material to show or is there any conventional technique like that?
That is one perfectly good method, yes! To “transition” shaders, you would use what is commonly called a “mask”, which is just a practical term for a black and white texture used as the mix factor for something. How you create or map this texture is no different from any other texture. You could use a gradient if that suits your purposes, or you could also use a UV mapped image.
Alright that’s good to know. It looks like I can plug an image directly into the frac part of a mix shader, so what is layer weight for?
Okay, I guess I can make a new topic for that then.