The problem is that here the texture just abruptly ends at the edges of the applied area. And if you look at the photo of the real monitor, you can see that the bumpy pattern actually “fades” before reaching the end of the backside piece.
I tried baking the texture and editing it on Photoshop, and while I managed to make this effect look decent in 2D, when I applied it as a bump map, it looked horrible.
So I am wondering what else I could try to do to reach that effect. Like, how would you go about doing this? Cuz I am a little clueless, haha.
You can use either a gradient texture, probably combined with a gradient ramp to fade it out or separate the texture coordinates and then use only the (probably) x channel as a gradient.
Multiply the gradient with your waves.
Something like this. Note that the channel you need to use in the separate XYZ node depends on your objects origin. If you rotate the origin this will also rotate.
Instead of the “object” output or the “generated” output of the Texture Coordinates it might make more sense to use your “UV” output. This all depends on your specific use case.
To better understand what is going on plug the output of the Separate XYZ and/or the Color ramp into the Base Color first without the Wave texture and change the settings in the Ramp.
Man, thank you so much. That definitely helped. I tried both the gradient node and the color ramp, and ended up finding the color ramp better. I tried a lot of different configurations, and the result was this:
