Hi. I am fairly new to Vue and was hoping for some quick advice. I am trying to have procedural bump material's scale controlled by a map. ie, if I had a greyscale gradient bitmap as the controling map, the scale of the bump material would be greater on the object where the gradient map was white than where it was black. Does that make sense? Can anyone clue me in on how to do this? Thanks, Matthew

I'm not so sure I understand what you're trying to do... have you tried adjusting the scale of the entire material? You can also adjust the scale of the individual maps, and functions, as well. Is this for a terrain? Some other object? For a terrain, I think you would have to make sure the picture you're using is the same size as the resolution of the terrain itself..... How about just a little more info, please, or maybe a quick render of what you're trying to do? --Mike

heyas; i would say, no, you can't do that. depending on what the scale was and how you wanted it to change... you could try this: select the material you want to have do the fading scale thing. turn on 'mix materials.' now copy (just drag and toss) the material to the material you're mixing it with. set the one side to the big size and one side to the small size. okay, now load your greyscale map as the function to mix the two things. so where black is, the one material will show, and where white is, the other will show. greys will be a mixture of the two... it won't be a direct shrinkage (if you're thinking of parallel lines vanishing to a horizon, for example.) the two materials will overlay at like 50% transparency. also play with the blending slider on the lower right; sliding it to the right will make the blend smoother and more gradual.

Right. Well, since I can't do what I want in Vue, I'll try to dummy it up in PS. So, I have a plane with a procedural bump material as shown in (1). I have a gradient map(2) that I want to use to control the scale of the bump material, such that the scale will be variable across the object as shown in (3). Does that make sense? Pictures (2) and (3) follow...

Picture (2), the gradient

Picture (3), variable scale bump...

I'm stepping out on a limb here, but are you by chance trying to fake a wire mesh object?

Hmm. Thanks for your reply, bloodsong. I was afraid I was going to have to resort to that. I had hoped I wouldn't, though.

Hey mjustmike. No, not trying to fake a mesh. The example I used was just to illustrate what kind of thing I'm trying to accomplish, and the grid does a good job of demonstrating that.

Okay, I was just curious, because the question of whether or not a terrain could be rendered as a wire mesh has come up before and I've discovered my own way of (sort of) doing it. But at least you caught Bloodsong's attention, one of our resident material geniuses, along with Varian and Guitta. They've been Vue-ing for a LOOOONGG time and always have the answers for those complex material questions...well, the answers for EVERYTHING, for that matter.

You might be able to do something like this, but not with a procedural material. For the example, let's say it's the grid that you want to vary, so that the upper squares are more heavily "embossed" (have greater depth) than the lower squares of the grid. You'd need to start in your paint program, layering the grid and the gradient together until it's looking like you want, where the squares start off deep and become more shallow. Then you'd need to use that image for the material -- either as an image object, or perhaps as a terrain material (scroll down the forum a ways for Smallspace's post with the bricks). This wouldn't be exactly the sort of thing you're asking about, but with a bit of effort in the paint program, I think you could get close to it. :)

They've been Vue-ing for a LOOOONGG time and always have the answers for those complex material questions...well, the answers for EVERYTHING, for that matter. -- ROFLOL!! :D There are many folks who've been using Vue longer than I have -- Guitta and Karl, for sure, and probably a lot more. Y'know, if I come off looking like an "expert," it's only because Vue users are happy users, who are always passing along tips, tricks, asking cool questions, trying out new things and making imaginative images. I mostly just watch what they do and listen in when they talk about it. :)