Dear Bill,

I'm on the verge of consuming an entire giant bag of M&M's and Habeniero Chips and then going for a job at KMart. Help!

I've got this shader going and have now totally confused myself, my eyes have crossed and I still have this miserable hard line on the lip. So the simple method didn't work so I thought I would try to really complicate it to see if that would work. Right...

There's just something here that I'm not getting. My lip mask is made from the tex template and blurred. Making it larger or smaller doesn't help.

The problem here is that , while I can resort to using texture maps with lipstick on them, they still won't have any gloss because I have been so careful to eleminate any hightlights or shadows from the map. There's nothing I hate worse than seeing white junk on a rendered lip because the texture has a highlight on the lip. It looks like the character has a serious case of chapped lips or scurvy or something worse! And the hard line of the gloss is just unacceptable.

Sydney's lip material doesn't cover the entire lip of my figure. I don't remember this happening before, but it's not stretching. Maybe it's not supposed to, I just don't know.

So, the problem is, how do I blur the lip? Your's works, mine doesn't. Why?

And no, I didn't make this up. It came from looking at a bunch of shaders and trying to figure out how to get a good blur. The Blinn shader is on the other skin parts of my figure. I like it and it's going to stay. The rest is my attempt to add the lip mask and get it to work.

And why hasn't anyone come up with a book on shaders so that one can look up a Blinn node and find out what excentricity means? I know that Blinn is excentric but I thought that just applied to me. In this case is excentric literal? It's like finding someone who can really explain Photoshop blending modes in a way that's easy to understand.

And another bone to pick. Someone said that shaders are "only math". That doen't help someone who's last math class was algebra in Junior High and uses a calculator to cook. Well I do understand add, subtract and multiply. Anything beyond that is a muddle.

Please don't tell me there aren't any shadows. I know they're not there. Too long to render. This isn't final, it's just to get the lip fixed so that I can get this working. Shader posted first, figure second.