2022-08-20 Procedural Nodes: Flagstones
Episode 20 of Sam Bowman’s Procedural Nodes series: https://youtu.be/JpJ3sEHfXJU
This was unusually messy, and I had to keep rewinding and rewinding… until I decided to label everything. It felt a lot more recipe-style (connect this node here with that node there) rather than explanatory (mix the Voronoi defining the grout with the colorramp controlling the grout noise), but since I had followed all the previous parts I could explain it to myself.
Shader:
I usually try to use the extra engagement with these older projects to use what I have learned since to improve them, but I’ve been too busy to do everything I want to do for the last 2 weeks, so too many things are going on “the list”, and I am not sure I’ll ever get to them again. I want to improve some things about this shader – the grout size is easy to change, but the colour of the stones is too fiddly; I want that to be easy as well. I think that’ll be simplest to achieve by using a Map Range node to remap the colours individually instead of shifting sliders on a ColorRamp. I also want to replace most of the ColorRamps with Map Range nodes, and experiment with how to emulate the different interpolations. But this is clearly not happening tonight. :sad face: At least it has warmed up a little and is no longer freezing, which was also hampering me.
Render:
Music: Sonata for Solo Violin Sz 117 by Béla Bartók, performed by Yehudi Menuhin (who commissioned it), and (separately) Viktoria Mullova. I heard about this piece in the best book I’ve read all year, Ryka Aoki’s Light From Uncommon Stars. Bartók is not even remotely background music, and so I alternated working and listening. Listening was hard; this isn’t quite atonal (or is it?), but it’s certainly “differently tonal” and I haven’t acquired the feel for it yet.