Shellac is the ability to place one material as a shell around another, composite and blends are being able to mix materials together, much as you can in the DTE, but I'd like to be able to do it with multiple image textures and to have a greater number of sources available. For composites think of things like being able to create a dirt map to sit on top of a texture. You can do this with the DTE but it's harder then having the composite or blend option. for shellac, think of things like a really deeply polished table, you can create a wood texture and a polish layer, with seperate specularities, refraction index etc, it'll create a deeper more realistic texture.

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Toolset: Blender, GIMP, Indigo Render, LuxRender, TopMod, Knotplot, Ivy Gen, Plant Studio.