Thanks @Fatesailor,
You can create the Keyshot effect you mentioned using a number of nodes in Blender: Ambient Occlusion, Pointiness or the Bevel shader.
I prefer Pointiness myself, although that one is topology-dependent (needs sufficient polygon detail to be effective).
No, these improvements were very quickly integrated to master. They are in daily builds and will be officially released in 2.81.
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.81/Cycles#Shaders
I have tried all the ways you mentioned Metin. There is no an efficient way to produce satisfying curvature shading. Ambient occlusion can not produce edge shading (it spreads all over the object). Pointiness too does not accumulate in edges only, it spreads around and it is impossible to achieve with it a good edge detecting shading (it has another issue too: it needs high density meshes for working out its effect on thin edges). As to the bevel shader, it is the only one which achieves satisfying edge detecting shading but it too has a serious lack: you can not choose separately the positive and negative (convex and concave) edge detection⌠so you can not produce separately âdirtâ (in concave edges) and âwearâ (in convex edges).
To put it in a different way: the need is for a powerful edge detecting (and drawing) shading. With all its parameters: the degree of the edges to detect, their being concave or convex, the blur and spread amount and the thickness of the edges. And all this independently of the mesh density.
Have a careful look at Keyshotâs related shading and you will understand easily what do I mean.
I think noise is pretty well catered for in blender, especially now we have enhancements to the existing textures (plus some additional control nodes that can support them).
Where blender is severely lacking is in geometric tiling and weave patterns. We have bricks and checker, which can get you so far - but I think some new out of the box tiling patterns would really help especially for arch vis, fabrics etc. Some of these are possible with some noddle wrangling, but they tend to be pretty complex. Patterns such as these along with the noise we have could be extremely powerful.
I couldnât agree more.
Hi @Fatesailor,
The refinements you mentioned can be achieved using additional nodes, such as a Color Ramp. Also, the Ambient Occlusion node is topology-independent. But Keyshotâs Curvature texture is more accessible for sure. Iâd also love to see Keyshotâs procedural scratches texture in Blender.
Is it just me that wants separate procedural texture nodes that deal in images instead of being attached by the hip into either EEVEE or Cycles? There are many things that shader implementations canât simply do so easily.
What do you mean?
Current nodes are simply inputs to a shader. There are no intermediate stages that you have access to AFAIK. Itâs all a big black box.
I still donât get it. Do you mean getting access to the nodes themselves? Like a script node?
Like saving to an image directly in the node system. Similar to Substance Designer.
Ah, I see. Yes, that would be nice. At the moment you have to texture bake.
An image export node would be nice - designed properly it could even output the various channels (like diffuse colour, normal, bump etc), however given we already have the ability to bake, iâd suggest the focus should be on giving more texturing options first.
I have a few Procedural Texture packs on the Blender Market which create tiling patterns as mentioned above. The textures output heightmap values, a UV map per tile, a unique random color per tile, and various masks.
Tiles and Bricks are already available, each with 8 varieties of layout.
Further packs are coming soon with weaves, woven straps, chain mail, differently-sized tiles, tiles with corner dots, radial tile layouts and more.
They might be what some of you are looking for.
They look really interesting - thanks, however I suspect the node groups for these are pretty complex.
What is needed are many of these âout of the boxâ,
Theyâre reasonably complex, as would be the textures within Blender if we were able to open them and have a look inside.
The node trees which create my textures come wrapped up in a neat group with as few inputs, and as clear as possible.
Some older users may remember in the pre-2.5 days being able to load in additional noise patterns as .dlls on Windows. There were some really great options available back then. Iâd love for Blender to become that extensible once again.
.dll shouldnât even be necessary, if we could write our own shaders with GLSL
It would be really nice to have some way to randomly distribute copies of a particular shape through space (like a particle array, but for procedural texturing). There may be a way to do that already, but if there is, I havenât found it. The most recent application where Iâve wished I had something like that is in distributing different-colored crystals to make a rock texture.
It would also be nice to have more image-filter-type nodes. Like a node to blur a texture, for example.
