The possibilities of Blender Pynodes are endless, especially since the 2.46 updates. A number of people have taken on the task of implementing some interesting and usefull Nodes (both textures and shaders, see thread started by BeBraw http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=125741 and make sure you check the wiki page he’s refering to) but I thought it might be usefull to publish new materials in this forum instead of confining them to the python forum. I have published my own Pynode materials on the blender open materials repository http://www.blender-materials.org/ and documented them on my own website http://www.swineworld.org/blender/ and this honeycomb material/texture is my latest work in progress:
Of course there are some things to weed out (especially the color alignment) but I will publish the .blend as soon as possible. The color differentation was made in a similar way as with the scales koi texture (see my webpage) by restricting coordinates to a single coordinate within a hexagonal shell and feeding this into a color texture. The coordinates in this case a actually a voronoi map but in contrast to the textures available in Blender this map is not random but based on the shortest distance to points on a regular hexagonal pattern. Anyway, here is a noodle that shows the setup to produce the pattern above:
any comment is appreciated: my goal is to create materials that look convincing not only from afar but also in the middle distance (although for real closeups you will still need to model actual details, at least as long as Pynodes cannot generate displacement).