SimonTheGuy Posted February 29, 2012 Share Posted February 29, 2012 Hey everyone, right now I'm on basically the last part of the look development of my thesis. I had made a post in Effects a few weeks ago and an answer got me half-way there. Right now I have an RSL shader that has layered textures. These textures have alphas that act as displacement maps. I have surface illumination drive the blending of these textures, as well as their displacement which is stored in the alpha. Long story short, it gives me a painterly look. To see what I mean, I have an image at the bottom of my shader in action. The problem is, the look doesn't quite work if the objects with the shader are at a distance. They still maintain a level of detail that wouldn't be possible if you were painting something (the size of the brush can only get so small) so I want to blend between my current shader, and another shader that does the same thing, but with different textures painted with much larger brush strokes. The blending would be driven by camera distance so the further it moves away the larger the strokes would appear. I'm fairly certain I know how to take the camera distance and plug it into a ramp position which could drive the transparency of the overlaying shader - the only problem is I have no idea how to layer shaders using prman. I've searched the web, and a lot of forums say you can't have layered prman shaders in Houdini, but they seemed a bit dated. Others said it can be done, but it would take a lot of tweaking. I've tried to come up with a way to do it in the shader itself, but it's too complicated a subject for my limited shader writing skils. If anyone has any suggestions or resources I could use I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks a lot. -Simon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SimonTheGuy Posted March 2, 2012 Author Share Posted March 2, 2012 It would seem that either my question is too obscure, uninteresting, poorly phrased, or all of the above. As it stands I've been going back into the RSL shader and trying to get it to do what I want. Rather than finding a way to layer shaders in Houdini, I have two image arrays, and I'm trying to blend them according to camera distance. So far it compiles but I'm going to have to do a decent amount of testing and tweaking to get it to work as I intend. I'm hoping someone might have an easier way through Houdini to layer but if not this seems to be on the right track. I'll post some progress soon in case anyone is lurking on this post and is interested in the outcome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gui Posted March 2, 2012 Share Posted March 2, 2012 Hello Simon, I would help if I knew a lot of shading, I was hoping to learn some here too... perhaps the guys who know the answer were out when you post, and there is a lot of posts here, perhaps bumping it up will help to get some visibility! good luck! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.