Volume absorption into a black and white 3D mask?

Hi!

Please see this image, I will try to explain what I’m trying to achieve.

I’m working on these cream smears, I want to get a particular effect and I don’t know how. When you smear a cream on a surface where it’s thinned out it becomes semi transparent even though the rest of the cream remains opaque. On this render I’m faking it (really badly) with a pointiness node setup but it’s not physically accurate at all and I want realism. Essentially what I want is the absorption map converted to a 3D black and white texture. Or is there a node or setup that creates a black and white map based on how much distance there is between the vertices of the mesh or creates a vertex density map on a evenly remashed version, something like this? I hope I explained it enough, appreciate the help!

I found the answer somewhere else. It’s the ambient occlusion node with the inside option checked in.

1 Like