santicor opened this issue on Mar 11, 2009 · 6 posts
bagginsbill posted Wed, 11 March 2009 at 5:14 PM
It depends on the effect. This is a pretty complex subject. The basic answer is, if you're combining two shader subtrees and you want to combine them by adding, then you Color_Math:Add them and connect the adder to the Alternate_Diffuse. If you want to muliply the effects, you Color_Math:Mul them and connect the multiplier to the Alternate_Diffuse. If you want to blend them, you Blender them and connect the Blender to the Altnerate_Diffuse.
However, the effects you mentioned would not go at the end of the existing tree of nodes, but rather in the beginning or the middle or both. And if you're talking about one of my GC shaders, this gets even more complicated.
Fresnel effects require that you calculate the amount of Fresnel reflection; call that FR. You'd then want to Blend the Diffuse node with a Reflect node, using FR as the Blending value. The Blender would connect to whatever the Diffuse node used to connect to. Probably that would be a Color_Math:Add node that is adding the Diffuse with the Blinn. Those two added together go to a Color_Math:Pow node that does the final gamma correction.
A mask effect almost always involves a Blender at the point where you want to mask two different things. You find the thing that is all by itself, and move that into a Blender node, and connect the Blender to where that thing used to be. Then you set or connect the second value of the Blender node, and finally connect the Mask to the Blender's Blending input to choose between the original thing and the new, masked thing.
Until you understand the math behind what you're doing, disconnecting and inserting and reconnecting nodes is going to be a mystery. This is why RobynsVeil has followed my advice in the "Nodes for Dummies" thread. She no longer cares about the nodes and wires. All she cares about is the math. It took her a couple weeks to get the hang of matmatic, but now she's making intermediate-level materials (15 to 30 nodes) without ever going into the material room.
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)