Cycles. Can it do procedural textures aka renderman style?

Artistic Support Materials and Textures
1

I’m just coming back to blender after trying out 3delight because something broke with the exporter and lots of strange errors from 3delight, oh well.

I thought I’d look at using cycles instead of bi, and was wondering if fully programetical textures can be done. The reason is there is a great eyeball texture that is done by, simplistically, knowing where the texture is on the ball and then creating the textures/colours as appropriate so that it scales very well when zooming in on it.

I was wondering if there is anything like this in cycles, or would I have to use textures and graphics in a similar way to bi, obviously after learning cycles :-/

I always wondered why cycles didn’t go the renderman way, although it is much much harder to code the textures using procedural code, although there are some rather clever graphical interfaces to spit code out, but i digress.

2

In Cycles, there are a number of procedural nodes which you can mix and do math operations on in many different ways, you can also create textured deformities by manipulating the coordinates before you plug it in to the coordinate input.

The mixing and math operations are done by color mix and math nodes, however, since it is a higher level interface than code, some effects cannot be done near as easily. However, the amount of effects you can do is still a bit higher than when using the stack-interface in BI.