the best way to use proceduralism for shader properties

[nmn]

Hi everyone

so What is the best way to use proceduralism for shader properties and what i mean by that is let us say for example you have a some material that has a specular property, and this property has some parameters and also a texture map slot, what would be the best way to attach a procedural noise to drive this specular, will it be by going inside the material and modifying the nodes to get the noise inside ? or would it be generating the nosie in another network and pluging it in the texture map slot? or create some noise texture and pluging it in ... etc (i prefer the procedural way though ... so any help would be really appreciated). (in fact with this question, i'm trying to understand a little bit how i can work with this side of houdini, taking into account that i'm coming from a maya background, in which you just click on the button beside the specular parameter for example and you choose whatever node or texture you want to plug in)

and my second question is i know how to use the aliases and variables window to define aliases and variables, and how to use the alias and set functions to delete them, but what i don't know is if it's possible or not to use a function to define a variable.

that problem arouse because i wanted to define a variable with the path of a directory at the same level of my $HIP so i wanted to get the parent of the hip in some way then reorient to the folder i want ... i didn't find a way ... so i ended up using the strreplace function in each one of my nodes

Thank you and best regards

Edited May 12, 2009 by nmn