Attached Link: http://www.shedofjoy.com

Ok people im not going to do you a material for all the material zones on every figure... jeese i did the shader do some ground work yourself...lol...

MY MUD SHADER VERSION2  IS NOW READY FOR YOU ALL.... just pop over to my website...

please tell me what you think of the mud colours now (as im thinking some of the mud splats are a bit too grey, see what you think, perhaps im wrong....)

oh and you DONT have to plug a texture node into the shader and if you want to change the diffuse colour of the texture just change the sky texture in both the nodes that your skin texture is plugged into...
oh... and i tried Hyperreal with blackhearted GND4 then plugged the resulting clump of nodes into where the texture goes on the mud shader..... and it works nicely... so considering i have yet to see BagginsBills VSS skin shader im not sure where it plugs into to know if this would work the same.....

now depending on bugs.... etc...lol im gonna try wood shaders...(started off a whole kettle of worms now)

Shedofjoy wrote "i use centimeters as my units of measurement" 

oops, sorry Shed, think I must have BB's bold type stencilled on my mind from playing with his shaders last night.

LOL yea I'm always telling everybody "MY UNITS ARE INCHES, PEOPLE". It's a common problem when copying shaders from screen shots.

hmm Perhaps i should change to inches???? or release 2 versions of the shaders...lol
Surely in Poser 8 they will create a universal scale of measurement for the shaders so that it knows when someone is using different measurement units and adjusts accordingly...

I now have a question, being that im a newbie...
How do you scale in the x,y,z co-ordinates of the nodes if it isnt in the node (ie the wood node)??
and secondly if i want to rotate the node how do i do that????

Thankyou to anyone who answers this...

Oh and BagginsBill where is this Node cult, as im quite interested -(as long as i dont have to draw a pentagram on the floor and throw chicken carcasses at relatives i dont mind joining)

Quote - hmm Perhaps i should change to inches???? or release 2 versions of the shaders...lol
Surely in Poser 8 they will create a universal scale of measurement for the shaders so that it knows when someone is using different measurement units and adjusts accordingly...

I now have a question, being that im a newbie...
How do you scale in the x,y,z co-ordinates of the nodes if it isnt in the node (ie the wood node)??
and secondly if i want to rotate the node how do i do that????

Thankyou to anyone who answers this...

Poser display units do not change the material file. Regardless of how you type in a bump or displacement, or how you have it displayed on your material room screen shot, it is actually stored in the file in inches. I have verified this in all versions of Poser.

I only have to scream about inches when I show a node setup as a screen shot and people are trying to reproduce my setup. When you share a material file, not a screen shot, the information is universal and will be correct for everybody.

Attached Link: RDNA's Node Cult

The Node Cult is at Runtime DNA (see attached link).....
...and no chicken carcasses required.

Quote - How do you scale in the x,y,z co-ordinates of the nodes if it isnt in the node (ie the wood node)??
and secondly if i want to rotate the node how do i do that????

Thankyou to anyone who answers this...

Nodes that have a single "Scale" parameter, such as the Wood node, cannot be adjusted to produce unequal scale independently for X, Y, and Z.

Only the nodes that have Scale_X, etc. can be adjust to stretch the pattern.

Simulating wood textures is a really interesting topic. I have a lot to tell you about this. But we should not do so in this thread.

And, also, I'm sure you want to experiment yourself, so unless you tell me otherwise, I will not come right out and tell you how to do it well. However, I'll give you lots of hints if you like. Or, if you want to see how I do things, I'll show you where to look.

There are 5 key aspects to think about for the wood. Ignore any and you will fail to achieve wood nirvana.

1. What coordinate system should be used to drive the wood grain pattern? Model XYZ? Global XYZ? UV? Related question - when you scale or stretch a prop, what should happen to the wood grain?
2. What is the actual grain pattern? How do you ensure that you capture the nature of the different kinds of wood in a generic way? Look closely at oak, cherry, maple to start. How are they different or the same?
3. How do you correlate bump with the grain?
   4) For stained or painted wood, how do you take that into account?
   5) For finished wood, how do you handle the finish? Satin, semi-gloss, and gloss all behave differently.

Finally, let me give you this clue:

The Poser Wood node is useless for wood.

It turns out that the hair has seven or eight different mat areas and I only applied the mud shader to one of them, which is why it didn't show up in my first renders.

Also, I think the reason why the mud displacement map didn't show up in the test render is that I lowered the contrast to counteract the lack of VSS to match the skin tone a little better, but that made the texture of the mud less visible.

Regardless, I much prefer the way V2 looks.

Bagginsbill :-any help at all is much appreciated, i will also be playing around with the nodes, and i have already come to the conclusion that the wood node is useless, i think its only there to fool the new commers to the material, therefore i have learned my first lesson in wood...lol

JWFokker:- love the renders, what hair is that? that you are using...

anyways i have to set this machine to a virus scan...lol... somthing i havent done in 3 years....lol..

Helios Hair

Thanks JWFokker... will have to get that one, can say the promos when i first saw it made me think maybe not, but your renders show it off alot better....

oh my virus scan was all clear, lol... no surprise there... now i have to do a back up but i will wait until i have an entire day spare...lol

Well I loaded your mud v2 and boy that's a lotta nodes. Trying to figure out how to integrate it with my skin shader, it looked pretty difficult. So I took it apart and put it back together.

The original shader was hard to understand - a lot of stuff in there was cobbled together in strange ways. I understand you "grew" it, so it's to be expected that it was a little wierd. I even found a section of it that wasn't doing anything, because you had it plugged into an input that was black, which meant the section was multiplied with 0, resulting in no impact on the results.

I reduced it to six nodes with nearly identical results.

Then I integrated the mud pattern into my skin shader, including proper gamma correction and conservation of energy. Then I added some more realistic wetness by including accurate Fresnel reflection. That made it a lot better.

I messed around with color and bump - I think I went too far on the bump in my experiment. When doing this sort of shader, you really need to do closeup renders and full-body renders all the time. I was only doing full body and didn't notice some problems had crept in until I did a closeup. So I'm not publishing my version yet.

But I thought you guys would like to see where I'm at.

Notice the puffiness of the eyelid and ears. I have too much displacement going. (Ignore the glowing teeth - forgot to load a newer tooth shader. That's an old buggy one I have there.)

Look closely at the edge of the head and shoulders. See the reflection of the sky? That makes it look more real.

I'll keep working on it. When it's done, I'll post the VSS template shader for you guys to download - those who are using VSS will find this a lot easier to apply.

Looks good so far. The specular lighting looks especially good. Is it possible to integrate the smeared mud look of shedofjoy's mud shader so that there's a transition between the freckle-ish brown spots and the chunky globules?

BB, that shader is really coming along.  It looks fantastic.  Interested in seeing the final product.

I added a few parameters so you can vary the coverage, the clumpy versus runny look, and get more smears. Basically, you control the bias and gain on the key Clouds node. Unfortunately, the parameters are not very intuitive. You have to play with them and when you modify one, another needs adjusting. I'll see if I can re-arrange a few terms to make them more understandable.

Looks excellent. I assume that changing it from wet to dry is as simple as adjusting the Reflection Value? This could be useful as a general dirt shader as well as mud.

 JWFokker, until I saw the logo in the corner, i thought you'd managed to incorporate something of this
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2709503
another Shader from guess who, then clicked a magic add hyper-realism button!

Just discovering that VSS brings us closer to that though, thanks again BB, those images look excellent by the way. With regrard to the thickening of ears and eyelids, I'm wondering if using the grouping tool to create new mat zones would be an option as it would be a shame to loose the density of mud on other areas.

Slightly OT but here's a link to a daft game I played with animating displacement a while ago
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-Lby7pMbNhg

i like what you have done Bagginsbill and i would like to see the how you reduced the shader to 6 nodes.
I have no idea how you add fresnel or accurate fresnel, but im sure i will pick it up along the way...lol...

JWFokker:- i think for version 3 i will do a (from the ground up) new mud shader that looks like that image you posted...very nice...(now im gonna have to scour the internet for a larger pic so i know whats going on....

Oh and on the wood front... i dumped the wood nodes and made quite a nice looking effect, but still i enter the You can change the scale in the way you want or rotate how you would like, or apply to only one facing direction.....i hope they make the shader room a little more friendly in the next poser incarnation...lol

Shedofjoy, I just downloaded version 2, eager to give it a try. It's been fascinating sitting here watching how you guys work these things through - more imprtant, seeing the effort and expertise that goes into it. I've always had a deep appreciation for those who make these items and then give them away - you (they) are what makes this hobby so much fun. Having the technical ability of a fruit fly, I cannot return the favors, but I'm visualizing all your hopes and dreams coming true.

Anyways i had a little inspiration concerning Version 3 of the mud shader and so about half hour ago i tested it out.... instead of getting JWFokkers effect that i was aiming for i got a dirty looking V4.....and all with 3 nodes (which i hope hold the key to the mystrious version 3 shader....
here are a few test renders... click to enlarge....
i will check back later when i have been to work again....damn employment...lol

I'm on the edge of my seat, awaiting Version 3.

I think you may have stumbled on making dirty shaders.  That could be useful and practical.

wow, version 3 looks awesome.. like dusty!!! more than muddy but i really like that effect.. in the words of veruca salt... "i want it now"

sorry about the delay, damned work,lol..
i will try to post something tomorow... maybe even a download of this new lite dirt shader. so watch this space.
anyway thats my lunch break over with, back to work for another 6 hours...grrrr

Hey, better than the other alternative.

Quote - Hey, better than the other alternative.

True, but as its my last hour of the week here, I notice that the clock seems to start running slower and slower

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.

This is wet.

sadly i got rid of the clouds node as i found it had a few short commings and wasn't versatile enough.... i replaced them (in a way) with the fbm node...

Curious - what were the shortcomings?

I like fBm, and I especially like Fractal_Sum (that's my 99% goto node).

However, in this shader I want the user to be able to adjust the scale of both noise effects using a single dial. That means I have to plug a node into both scale inputs, so the user edits that one number. This works fine with Clouds.

With the other types of noise nodes, where there are independent X, Y, and Z scale parameters, you would think you could do the same. But, alas, Poser behaves differently for those nodes. I don't know why.

Here's what it does. Each of those parameters defines the rate at which the pattern evolves in that direction. For example if X_Scale is 1 versus .5, the pattern evolves across the model coordinates space twice as rapidly with the .5 as with the 1. Basically, the input to the noise pattern lookup is X / X_Scale.

However, as soon as you plug any sort of node into one of those scale inputs, the internal use of the model X coordinate is dropped. Instead, the value plugged in is used, then DIVIDED by the scale parameter numeric value. This is totally different than other node parameters.

For almost any node numeric parameter, there is a number and a socket. In general, the value produced by the socket is 1 if nothing is plugged in. The input parameter value (pv) is multiplied with the socket value (sv) so that the effective value is pv * sv. Whatever the underlying function is (f), then the effect produced is f(pv * sv). With me so far?

But with the 3-d noise nodes, it is f(1/pv) if nothing is plugged in, and it is sv/pv (no f used) if something is plugged in.

I don't know if this is making sense to you all, but it's very important. The bottom line is that you cannot get the functions to continue to work if you plug in any node at all.

Knowing this is how they work, I have actually taken advantage of this at times. Consider the fBm node. It evolves the pattern according to fBm(mx/X_Scale, my/Y_Scale, mz/Z_Scale), where mx, my, mz represent model coordinates of the point being rendered. (Model coordinates are those coordinates of the original imported model, not the world coordinates of the prop after it is translated, rotated, and scaled.) Well, what if I want the pattern to evolve according to U and V coordinates, not model coordinates? Simple - I plug in U and V into X_Scale and Y_Scale, and I plug a 0 or some other constant into Z_Scale. This let's me define noise patterns in 2-D UV space instead of 3-D model space. 

If I were designing the nodes, I would not have done this. I would have provided 2-D and 3-D versions of all the noise nodes, not 3-D versions that change their internal logic when you plug in a node.

I think the use of a control mask is going to be needed for this shader. Like a transmap, it will control where the affect is applied.

Vegetable oil is so translucent, that a thin layer of it has no color that I can see.

I've been trying to make a shader do this for years. In this mud shader, I had two effects - puddles and splatter droplets. The splatter is the same as I've used before trying to get water droplets on skin. But I could never get them to look right.

The difference now is that instead of using a simple Edge_Blend for the amount of reflection, I'm actually using the Fresnel equations that exactly describe how reflections vary with viewing angle. I used to think that the approximations I've always used were good enough. But they're not. You have to use exactly the real physics, or it doesn't come off right.

Quote - Red paint. Same shader. I added more control parameters. There are gravity effects, where droplets hang down from surfaces. Unfortunately, this makes the bottom of the upper eyelid extend downward.

I think the use of a control mask is going to be needed for this shader. Like a transmap, it will control where the affect is applied.

I was wondering when the mud might turn to blood! With regard to the eye, although there is some distortion, I Ithink its fairly realistic, gloop like that would run and accumate on the lashes, that is after all what they are for.

Shedofjoy, thanks again for the shader I just used it in a render challenge over at Daz, but it wouldn't add anything to the discussion here so I won't clutter up the thread when there are so many more interesting developments

BB, did you hear that thud? I'll just reach down and pick up my jaw 

As usual, I'm right back where I'm always at. From a distance it looks good, and even up close any surface pointed right at the camera is good. But the edge surfaces are a mess.

Sigh.

If Poser had the ability to do a double surface shader, I could get this right in a heartbeat. I have perfect water shaders. I have near-perfect skin shaders. But to try to get a single surface to pretend to be skin with water over it seems impossible. If I could just tell Poser to automatically clone the skin geometry, keeping the skin shader on the original, and putting the water droplet shader on the clone (with refraction) I'd be all set.

I'll tell you another problem - this shader stands at 118 nodes right now, and I removed the AO stuff temporarily. There are so many effects that are expensive in it. The sum total of these makes renders take a loooong time.

I think the only way to do anything remotely like that would be to use two instances of the figure and conform one to the other, then hide the bits you don't need, eyes, teeth etc. Basically using a character as a body suit. P7 does at least make that easier to do with the duplicate feature. Not very elegant and heavy on render times.  Other than that I can only suggest calling in help from the Python wizards 

Sorry for not being able to add anything of note here. But I hafta comment on:

Quote - Heheh - put your jaw back - I'm not done apparently.

As usual, I'm right back where I'm always at.

Bagginsbill, your work effing amazes me.
(My jaw remains dropped!)  ;)
And thank you, shedofjoy, for your incredible offering and this thread!

Well, I just hope you decide to release the mud/paint/oil shader with VSS. That alone would be incredibly useful, even if it's not fully capable of doing water droplets.

Oil would be fantastic.

118 nodes! Full respect to you understanding what's goimng on in there, I got the wooly hat on the inside feeling as  I tried to follow Shedofjoy's original post