Empty promises about procedural texturing

[moony]

I’m really surprised procedural texturing hasn’t made greater strides over the years.

I started my 3d modelling and texturing journey using Imagine 2.0 on the Amiga, way back in 1992 (actually I started with VU-3D on the ZX Spectrum - but that didn’t really have texturing).

Imagine 2.0 already had a decent set of procedural textures, and when Imagine 3.0 came along and expanded the set (especially with an addon procedural texture pack - which I believe is based on the IFW texture library).

Things don’t really seem to have moved on all that much - which is a shame. I much prefer designing materials using procedural textures.

There was a flurry of activity a couple of years ago around using SDFs to expand the procedural texture toolset - and was showing promise and there were experimental builds and everything:

SDF Procedural Textures - upcoming cycles feature (hopefully)

Some other tests I did from the other thread SDFs show great promise for making regular repeating procedural tile materials for archvis - this material takes just a single SDF shape (an elipse) but transforms it using a combination of polar and tile repeat functions to create a flower petal type motif. [screen3] You can also build fully volumetric shapes, like this hex bolt. [screen10] Just another tile pattern [screen5]

But it appears to have died a death. It’s a shame because this SDF style approach, building textures form simpler components and transforms really fits well with the whole node based/geonodes paradigm.

Another feature that procedural textures are missing is loops. Secrop created a loop node for cycles using python a few years back and geonodes has (I believe) just had one added. This is a very powerful feature and it would be nice to have out of the box.

Secrop's Cycles "Loop" node

Secrop recently posted a python node which allows you to create iterative loops within cycles materials (e.g. one such application would be to change the scale of a texture with each iteration and overlay it back onto the original to create additional detail). I’m still playing with it, but I believe it has the potential to be very powerful indeed. I just thought i’d show one interesting material I have managed so far. It looks like a type of marble effect - but I haven’t created anything qui…

Some of the new functionality in the Voronoi procedural texture (e.g. fractal Voronoi), could have actually been achieved by adding a texture loop node instead - with the advantage that it would have worked across any of Cycles procedural textures, not just Voronoi. I actually did experiments along these lines in the thread above - with each subsequent layer of texture having a increasingly smaller scale.