bagginsbill opened this issue on May 17, 2007 · 67 posts
bagginsbill posted Sat, 19 May 2007 at 6:57 AM
pj: yes it works with morphs. For future reference, a procedural texture, not just this iris one, will behave just the same as an image based one. An image is nothing more than a two-dimensional math function that is driven by (called with) U and V coordinates. So, too, is my iris shader driven by U and V coordinates. When you morph a prop, the U and V coordinates move, thus morphing the texture automatically no matter what kind it is.
By the way, there's nothing stopping you from running the procedural shader to produce an image which you save and use from then on.
Does everybody understand that? It's called texture "baking", although true texture baking involves more than that.
Basically, you install the eye shader on a one-sided square, using only the Alternate_Diffuse channel so that the current light settings have no influence on the render. This is how I made the image I posted earlier - it is just the procedural applied to a one-sided square, rendered, then saved and uploaded.
An image like that (one with the whole eye including the whites) can be used directly just the same as all the hand-made ones.
As a merchant, you could generate several thousand of these in a few hours, no two alike, all photorealistic, and sell the whole lot for $5 because it suddenly is no work at all.
Oh, wait a minute. 
I just realized two things:
I should find out how much merchants make selling eye textures before I decide what I'm giving away for free. Perhaps I don't realize the total market size? I've often wondered about that. I'm not going to change my mind if the total market for eye textures is only $500 a year. But if I could realistically expect to make $10K or more, maybe I ought to rethink this. Any opinions, people?
If I do give it away, I'm going to make a lot of enemies as I undercut the market, right? Opinions?
Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)