The question has been asked of Eric before but I guess he is still busy.

The EnhanceC Shader Suite is immence and complex. It badly is in need of a very (long!) comprehensive tutorial coverage. It is pretty obvious to me that the majority of us are not even scratching the surface of its capabilities.

Todays example. EnhanceCOrganic2 comes with a "Border" attachment!!!???

Any takers on doing a complex tutorial suite for us?

Even a flowchart showing how and when and why the various EnhanceC bits and pieces go together in the Shader Tree would be welcome.

Hi,

Sorry I don't have any new tutorials to announce, but I can explain the mysterious Border sub shader.

Organic 2 (and some of the others like Tile, Panel, Skin, etc.) have different zones in the shader and you can shade those zones independently by using the plus button to add multiple sub shaders.  In the case of Organic 2, the Border subshader shades the area in between the zones.

The Panels section of the Getting started with Enhance:C tutorial talks a little bit about the zone stuff in the context of the Panels shader. It unfortunately does not do anything with the Grout shader that corresponds to the Border of the Organic 2 shader, but it may help visualize what is going on.

Basically think of Border as the Grout of Organic 2.

The Octaves slider is tied to those shader zones and has two handles. The left most is how deeply the zones are calculated and the right most is how deeply the border is calculated. This lets you make big zones and still have a rough border.

Does that make sense?

Regards,

Thanks for the quick reply Eric. At first glance your answers are going to take a while to puzzle through--there is a big gap in I guess "principles" about the whole shader room/EnhanceC combinations that still need to be grasped.

I have a busy day ahead.

A long day and it felt mostly like groping around in the dark still.  Trying to understand the how/why of the setups in the supplied shaders also confused me. I really do need kindergarten level step by step education.

Here's a little more on what I was talking about before. In the screen shot below I've got an Organic 2 shader. It's got a bunch of sub shaders that are all basically a Color Gradient with Organic 1 set on Dirt as a sub shader.

The first sub shader is the Border you mentioned in your original post. That shader controls the color between the cells (or grout if you wish).

Next I used the button that is a circle with a plus sign (not sure it's real name) to add the three other sub shaders. Enhance:C will randomly assign one of those to each cell. Notice in the preview window that some are a little green, some more red, some gray.

This helps you create a little variety in these types of shaders. Make a few sub shaders that are a little different and won't look like each tile/cell/panel are exactly the same. On the Common Tab you can also adjust how that behaves by changing the Subshader Mixing. The Blend Two option will only use the first two and will randomly blend them in each cell.

An easier way to get the hang of how all that works is playing with the Enhance:C Tile shader. Set it's Grout color to white and then start adding other sub shaders, change them to random colors and see what it does to your tiles.

PS. Sorry about the wide screen shot.

Regards,

Thanks Eric.

I WAS going to have a quiet day!

Brian

Eric. That was interesting. However I can not match your Preview example trying to follow your settings.

I make the following comments--good learning?

1. With whatever setting in Common, the 3rd and 4th gradient appear to make little if any difference.

2. Can not see any difference by adding Organic 2 to Highlight or Bump which not served just as well by Value?(Or can you explain the Organic usage in mor detail please).

1. Those gradients are pretty similar. Try using just a solid color for your subshader for experimentation purposes.

2. In the Highlight channel I dropped the Organic alone in there (no sub shaders). This made the cells have a stronger highlight (since they were brighter) and the grout nearly no highlight. In the bump channel I did the same except I also went to the Bevel tab and kicked up the Bump Intensity to about 200%.

Regards,

I will find this helpful as well Eric. Many thanks!

Thanks Eric. BUT!!! It really does highlight the real gap in the learning/explanation gap between those who understand and those who want to!

For example, in the shader drop downs there are 4 main EnhanceC headings, each with individual dropdowns!.

I suggest that a majority of us dont know -not a clue-the whys and wherefores of usage/relationships of these groups.

(Some similar difficulties relate to the Terrain Tools brilliant plugin where it is really impossible to do things if anything is set other than strictly as per the tute--unable to work out variations which should be comon/normal acceptable variations?) 

It's not a critisism--it's spelling out that most of us are nerds needing spoon feeding!

For the life of me I can not work out why the imagery of Eric's and mine differs so much!

It's looks like you're mostly there. I've got Enhance:C Organic 1 set on Dirt as the subshader of my color gradients and maybe kick down the shininess. I had it pretty low which gives a big highlight.

Unfortunately I didn't save that scene after I was done or I'd just post it.

Regards,

Thanks Eric.  More nose to the learning grindstone.

I DID save my shaders and .car files so I can analyse what I did!