I am trying to create a glossy shader that allows control of it’s roughness over it’s depth ‘into’ an object via a Color Ramp. In other words, if, for example, I had an array of several objects and a mirror reflecting them, I could have the first few objects perfectly clear, then the next one rough, and the one after that clear. I’ve tried fooling around with the light path node, and I do believe it is possible, I’m just not sure how. I’d appreciate help from any node-experts on here
As you can see, the cube of spheres is built by a mix of arrays and mirror… and it has a single material of which the color is determined by the distance from the center.
The “Vector Input” node group is just a fancy “Combine RGB” which shows the values. And if I plugged the Object coordinates this way, that’s just to be able to easily unplug one component and set it to zero. For example:
@RickyBlender: I think so. Charcoal could be really nice this way. Let me work a little on the idea… and do some snapshots of my node tree. But, before that…
@CGEffex: I had 5 minutes to lose so here is an image playing on glossiness.
I used only the Z component to make the material brighter and shinier towards the top. I used my complex node tree but if you want to make a material change only along one axis, it’s simpler to directly do some calculations on the corresponding XYZ component.
That was my intention too… Let’s not highjack this thread. The new charcoal thread is over there: