Inspired by MartinZ’s wave test - I have created my own scene to try out different surface shapes and sizes. Images are blurred intentionally as I was getting some moire patters. I used the inbuilt wave texture and micro-displacement to create the geometry. I used an RGB curve node to modify the surface shape and a math node to change the height.
These are the surface types I have tested so far:
- A sine wave
- Flattened sine wave (same height as 1)
- Sharpened sine wave (same height as 1)
- Sine wave 1/5th the height of 1
- Sine wave double the height of 1
It’s pretty clear that both height and shape have a huge impact on both the falloff characteristics as well as the facing and glancing colours.
I suppose the next stage would be to formalise this scene. If I can measure the angle of incidence at various points on the planes - I could then plot the red colour value against angle on a graph and get a set of measured falloff curves for each surface type.