Thanks for posting that, very interesting.

What I'm really after here is way to mask of part of the sphere free form using the cursor to paint or draw the star shaped mask and put one procedual material outside the star mask, then invert the mask and and put a seperate and differnet procedual material in the star mask.

Then I would just assian some displacement amount to whaever procedual material inside the star shape.

However I can't find any masking tools in Vue.
I've looked online and in the pdf manual.

In my question I used terms like Sphere and star and black and white, just to try simplfy my question. But I think that's working against me now. So I'll just say what I'm doing.

The real project:
A styleized 3d Tree Trunk with seperate sphere embedded.
Sphere is to look somewhat engluffed by Tree Trunk as when a branch is cut off and the tree heals around the edges of where brnch used to be.

I thought I could just model the tree trunk in Zbrush and import that into vue and give it a nice procedual trunk mat.
Then stick a view primative shere into the truck with just a little of the sphere sticking out. Sphere is a lumious procedural alien mat of some kind

Where the sphere cuts into the trunk would not very natural so that's where I need to freeform mask So I can precisely draw or paint that unnatural intersection area maybe with varient of the trunk material has more displacement so the trunk in that area could appear to swell up and engluf the edges of the sphere.

I thought rather than model the Engulfment area in zbrush that maybe I can accomplish that part by the method I mentioned using Vue if there is mask tool assianed to the cursor.

I don't think I can figure line up what need where I need it by using your alpha process.

Any thoughts.

 

 

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