Attached Link: http://www.hybridculture.co.uk/freeitems/8layers.zip

The pyramid is 20 Poser units high. It is UV-mapped planar on the y-axis. I want to apply 8 layers of texture using the "P" variable. I can achieve this in the picture on the right, but then I have no blending of the colours, which I want. In the picture on the left I can get two sets of four layers to blend, but I cannot get the two sets to blend with each other.

Because of what I want to use this for, I cannot use the "U" or "V" variables, or the "N" variable.

I have a downlink of the prop with materials if anyone wants to try to find a solution to my problem (25Kb download).
I need a simple solution, as each layer still has to have a complex procedural material added to it.

If it is not possible to do this, I can also then use a 4 layer blend, but only if I can then set the height of each layer individually, as well as the level of blend between the layers. Using a normal colour ramp does not allow you to set the height or the blend between layers.

I have spent a total of 46 hours in the material room working on this, and have tried 30 different methods, and this is the closest I have got.

Please note that e-Frontier have changed the value of "P" from Poser 5 to 6, so the value of "P" in Poser 6 is one tenth of that in Poser 5. I have included the Poser 5 and 6 versions of the prop. This is the Poser 6 prop rendered in Poser 5, so make sure you use the correct one for your version.

Well, I don't know too much about what you are doing, but did you try plugging the two P nodes into an Edge Blend node? A regular Blend node would probably just mix the colors together, so that wouldn't work.

This look like what you want ?

As shown, this only does five colours, but you can make it do as many as you like by just adding more rows of three nodes each in the same pattern.

This one does 7 colours and you can add another 3 with each set of extra nodes you add.

Here's a render showing both of them.

Here's the screenshot of one segment of the network I used.

The position of the base of each band can be adjusted, as can the height of the blend zones (they all use the same, but you could make them different).

Composite screenshot of full network.

There may be ways to optimise the network, but play around with the settings first.

The network (from P6), save as an MT5

This is so cool and I'm having quite a bit of fun messing around with it, but I really have no idea what I'm doing. First, I think N is "Normal to the surface" right? So what is P? Then you take P and put it into a Math Add, but what are we adding and why is it negative values and what do they represent? That goes into Clamp, what is a clamp? Does anybody know a good tutorial that explains how to "read" these things.

P is a node that extracts the xyz coordinates of each point in space. By having the x and z componenets set to 0, we're just finding out how far up the y axis each point is (i.e. how far above the ground it is). We want each blend to start at a certain height and finish at a certain height, but the blend input needs to be between 0 and 1, so if we want the blend to happen between height 2 and height 3 then we need to alter the "signal" coming out of P in some way so that 2 looks like 0 and 3 looks like one. The easy way to do that is to subtract 2 from the signal. However, these leaves us with a problem - There are still a lot of values of the signal outside the 0 to 1 range. That's easy to fix with a clamp function. Clamp just sets anything below 0 to 0 and anything above 1 to 1, but leaves values between 0 and 1 unaltered. We could probably get away without having the clams at all because the blender node is happy enough to interpret negative values as 0 and values about 1 as 1. By changing the values in the add function, you can adjust the height and the blend width for each transition.

Thanks a lot. Your cheques are in the mail, lol, and you have my eternal gratitude. I actually tried Ajax's first solution, I just had my Add values inverted so I thought it wasn't working. It's never as easy as you think, but never as hard as it looks. Thanks again.

Lou? This wasn't a good thread for me to look at was it?! LOL goes off to take Tylenol

Just checking if I got this all straight:

Changing the value of "A" changes the start height of each layer. So if my prop was 10 Poser units high, and I wanted 8 layers, my last layer would be 8.75.

Changing the value of "B" changes the height of the actual blend area. Decreasing this value narrows the band, increasing it broadens the band.

Changing the value of "C" changes the overall, or global, height of all the layers. Increasing this value moves all the layers down, and decreasing it moves all the layers up.

If I am using the same shader in Poser 5, I set the value of "D" to 100, and it will work fine.

Is this all correct? Any other features I haven't discovered?

What exactly is the function of the "Comp" node. I know it doesn't work without it, but what does the Comp node do in mathematical terms. (I don't read Greek, so I couldn't understand the explanation in the English Poser manual, lol)

This is seriously much better than I had hoped for. I will definitely give you a free copy of the final product. In fact, I'll give you ten free copies.

"Changing the value of "A" changes the start height of each layer. So if my prop was 10 Poser units high, and I wanted 8 layers, my last layer would be 8.75"
Correct, and can be any value greater than the minimum Y value and less than the maximum Y value, so long as they're no closer than the blend zone height.

"Changing the value of "B" changes the height of the actual blend area. Decreasing this value narrows the band, increasing it broadens the band."
Correct.

"Changing the value of "C" changes the overall, or global, height of all the layers. Increasing this value moves all the layers down, and decreasing it moves all the layers up."
Changing this value will have that effect, but this node is really there just to calculate the value of half the blend zone height, so that the blend zone can be positioned evenly around the band start height.

"If I am using the same shader in Poser 5, I set the value of "D" to 100, and it will work fine."
Correct. This would be consistent with the order of magnitude difference you mentioned (it's a fiddle^H^H^H^H^H^H tuning factor).

"What exactly is the function of the "Comp" node ?"
The P node returns a point i.e. something that has an X, Y, and Z value (a 3 component vector). The Comp node turns this vector in to a single number which is the component as set in the "Component" input : 0 = X, 1 = Y, 2 = Z.
You can also use it to split out one of red, green, or blue from a colour.

As I mention briefly in post #8, the blend zones don't all have to be the same height. If you want different heights for some zones, just make copies of the nodes you've marked B and C, adjust Value_1 in the new B and connect to the nodes for the band.
It might be a good idea to draw out a more complex scheme on graph paper first to get the values you need.

I suspect that by animating some of the node values, it would be possible to get some interesting visual effects.

Thank you so much for the interpretation. Still have a question, ""blend input needs to be between 0 and 1" Why? And how about the second part of my question? Do you know any good tutorials or resources to help me learn how to read these things?

Rothrock, I searched for tutorials as well, but I found the easiest way to learn was to open existing shaders and to analyze them, change figures and see the effects, and to try and delete nodes and add nodes to see the effect. The material room has infinite possibilites. I have also just bought Shaderspider, and that opens up the possibilities even more. HAving a lot of fun learning.