shedofjoy opened this issue on Jan 03, 2009 · 129 posts
bagginsbill posted Fri, 09 January 2009 at 10:06 AM
Hi guys.
Shedofjoy, your dry dirty look is great. As you've found, that's a pretty easy thing to do - basically a clouds node and no trickery needed for specular or bump.
I'm still working on the thicker, caked-on mud aspect. I simplified the pattern generator even further. I now have only two clouds nodes, instead of the 3 clouds and one granite I was using earlier. One generates simultaneously the overall distribution of puddles and droplets as well as the bump pattern for the puddles. The other generates the droplets.
Among all the nodes, the ray-traced are obviously the most expensive, and then the second tier of hard-to-calculate are the nodes based on noise, such as clouds, fractal_sum, etc. So minimizing how many of these there are is a good thing.
In general, if you can somehow trade a noise node for up to 30 math nodes, you've improved performance. So I'm using more math nodes.
The other thing I'm working on is an effective dial for wet versus dry. I've got one dial (Mud Dry) that alters a whole bunch of factors for this. When the mud is wet (Mud Dry = 0), then you get lots of reflection, lots more discrete splatter droplets, and less bumpiness to the puddles. When the mud is dry (Mud Dry = 1), you get no reflection, and all the splatter droplets become dusty smudges, and the puddles get more bumpy.
I like the idea of this dial very much. When you pick a mud color, that is the color of the mud when it is wet. As you increase the dry value, this color is automatically changed the same way real dirt changes color as it dries. Well, I'm trying anyway. This is one of those areas where guessing the right algorithm is hard, and then fine-tuning the factors is even harder.
I'm thinking about adding cracks in the mud when its dry. Haven't done that yet, but I expect it would add to the realism.
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