RGB shader combine

If you mean like this

No it doesn’t work because every glass shader gets 1,1,1.

Anyway that shader with brick texture is awesome

exactly,in this case the rgb shader combine node would be perfect :wink:

sure you can build what ever you want,but this is was not the point of the ideas in this thread.

for your three glass refraction shader example,a color fac mixshader would be perfect.three different IOR into a rgb combine ,into a colored fac,with a white glass or glossy shader,done.

and yes,it would be inefficient to split the builds to three shader trees,this is why i had the idea,and look at the energyconservation example above.how can you combine these easy now?

can you mockup a nodetree?

i have posted examples above, earlyer in this thread

this example trichromatic build,which would break the energy conservation btw(described earlyer)


would shrink with colored input fac to this (which result would be correct in theory,with 7 nodes less)

Ah ok, so you’d build it still with 3 glass shaders?

if i want to build a trichromatic dispersion shader or something similar,sure.
the three glass shader are not that important,if you want to mix a shader layer underneath ,it gets to become even complicated, the more you want to build and want to combine.

you can split mix and combine colors,but not shaders that easy now.

Sorry yes, the RGB node outputs a greyscale value.

Why would you use glass shader though? The dispersion only happen in the refractive part, right? Isn’t it better to just add three R/G/B refraction shaders together with different IORs, and fresnel mix white glossy on top of it? Possibly handling shadows separately if not relying on caustics. If you need dispersion from colored glass, just multiply RGBMix with the SeparateRGB outputs. Although volume absorption would be the way to handle colored glass?


Edit: I didn’t pay attention to wavelength and IOR spread thingy, but you get the idea.

yes,sure with refraction shader would be correct.yes usally its a kind of absorption in the glass what makes it colored.

as i pointed many times in this thread,my examples are just examples,your build or my build is not that important at this point.like you can see in my last screenshots, its just to show how we could benefit from a colored fac mix shader,to shrink and simplify builds.

you could optimize your build with a rgb shader channel combine node,too.you dont would need the three rgb multiply nodes,you dont even need the rgb seperate node,you dont need 2 add nodes,instead you could delete all these 6 nodes and connect just the 3 refraction nodes to the rgb shader channel combine node.

this would look your build then,no need for split the inputs,would you like it?i would.

to describe the idea of the rgb channel shader combine node better.it would work like a addshader but instead combine the complete rgb channels,it would takes just the R G and B channels form each shader seperately (peer shader input) and combine it to one RGB shader together.

Sure, I don’t mind if it’s an easy thing to do. Was just pointing out the workaround for this given case isn’t really that hard.

For coherence reasons, I’d expect also a “Shader RGB Separate” node.
Still, apart from this corner case (glass diffraction) that can save 6 nodes (but still calculates the same amount of shaders, so no speed gain), I have to understand the usefulness of this.
…Sorry, looks like this times I’m hard to learn! :nerd_face:

no,think about a add shader,there is no need to split a shader.the only case to combine the rgb channels,i have described to death in this thread.

however the possibilitys of this ideas seems not be seen ,thats a shame.even from longtime users that working with node builds and materials. :disappointed: :disappointed: :disappointed:

edit,

i have posted a example of the color fac mixshader allready,in this case you safe 7 nodes,and dont need 3 glossy shader to calc,but only 1.what is not to understand?

Ok I saw up here your post where you skipped the three shader nodes :man_dancing:
I think I’m hard to understand because I learned long ago the difference between specular and metallic workflow, and then always used the latter. So I lost memories about almost everything about specular… :bowing_man: