Hey Zone8,

Sorry about the displacement materials slowing down.

The book isn't out yet, but look for it in May. However, Geekatplay has a series of tutorials called Discovering Vue which I recorded.

And last, :), slope constraints can be found in at least three places. In the Advanced Material Editor, If you're using a Mixed material you will have an Influence of environment tab. In the middle of that tab is the Influence of slope. That isn't exactly a constraint, but it works with slope and is part of what makes mixed materials useful. Layered materials, where you haven't selected mixed type, but you are adding layers, will give you an Environment tab. This has an actual Slope constraint group. The values on the Slope range slider go from -1 to 1. 1 is a flat surface. So is -1, but that is upside down (As, for instance, on the underside of a sphere) and 0 = vertical; straight up and down. Anyway, so you see you can set it so a material layer only appears at around a 45 degree angle (as with scree - the small rocks that break off a vertical rock wall and pile up at the bottom). Altitude constraint can also help with this too. As you can probably see, you can control the material through slope better with layers than using mixed materials.

Anyway, the third place this slope influence appears is in the Influence of environment tab in the Filter editor for materials. This lets you have a filter that, for instance, works very strongly if there is a slope. Here, you can't change what values are influencing it. The influencing values are -1 and 1. This means that with a strong influence, things are more likely to appear on flat places than vertical. So you can make some kind of color or bumpiness appearing through a function and filter be stronger in flat areas than sloped areas.

Hope that helps.

Ami

Author of

3D Art Essentials: The Fundamentals of 3D Modeling, Texturing and Animation Vue 7 From the Ground Up