Hi everyone, A while back (in May) I posted a question about using procedural shaders and texture maps on the same material. Some good folks such as Ghostship2, seachnasaigh, Sam Therapy and RedPhantom replied, which I appreciate. But due to illness, and some unexpected personal issues, I was unable to follow up with them. Once I was able to get going again, I moved on with several other projects, but now I find myself back at the same original question which I'd like to ask for some help with, please. I'm texturing an aircraft wing with a chrome-looking procedural shader I made. However, I'd also like to place a logo and some lettering on the same wing suface. I render my work in Superfly because the chrome looks so much better than it does in Firefly. But how can I apply a logo on top of my chrome shader? Seems that earlier some folks said something about masking and a blender node in Superfly, but I don't know how to proceed. Any help on this would be truly appreciated.

Steve

I don't have an airplane, so I used a shuttle for my example. You need a black and white mask which gets plugged into the fac of the mixclosure. The black part of the mask will use the top closure and the white uses the bottom. I just used a diffuse node with an image mask for the flag. You could use any shader setup you want.

here's what it looks like rendered

Wow, that looks great! I'm going to give it a try....

May I see an enlarged pic of what your mask looks like, please?

it's just a couple of white areas where the flag was on the original texture that came with this ship. I probably could have easily added the NASA logo too.

This is great - I'm looking forward to having a go at it. I promise, I'm not ignoring you - thank you for the help, by the way. I work very early in the morning til mis afternoon, and after that is all the errands and such I have to run. Hoping to give it a go this evening. I'll let you know how it goes

Steve

Ok, so I'm working on setting up the nodes as you showed but I have two questions, please:

1. Where does the "cycles surface" node attach to the Poser surface (diffuse color, alternate diffuse, etc)?
2. On the "mix closure" node, closure 1 has an extended node that is titled "your chrome shader". I'm assuming that this refers to the procedural chrome shader that I made? If so, I'm confused completely.... how do I set this up to reference a complicated shader I made?

Sorry, but I'm pretty lost at this point

1. You don't connect the cycles surface node to the poser surface node. It is a replacement for it (for superfly renders only). Poser 11 has 3 surface nodes rather than the one poser has had right along. There's alose the physical surface node which is good for PBR shaders. If you look at the cycles surface node, you'll see there is no plug to feed it into something else. Instead, there is a spot to indicate which render engine you want to use it for.

2. The image shows the chrome setup I used. It was something Bagginsbill posted at one time. Where I had the node that said "you chrome shader" I had collapsed it to simplify the view. I don't know what shader you had in mind for your render, but the node you would plug into the surface node is what you would plug into the final mix closure node. When using masks like this, I often collapse the nodes for each of the shaders to make it easier to work with.

you can find the collapse function if you right click on the material pallet

RedPhantom, hi and I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. between work, kids, life in general, finding spare time can be a challenge for sure. So I followed your directions as best I could and came out with something I can't explain. Or rather, it would be better to explain with pictures. So I'm uploading pics that show how I made my simple, but very effective chrome shader, how I combined it with your instructions, and the result. Also I'm including pics of the mask and texture map. When you have time, can you please take a look and help me figure out what i did wrong? Thanks,

Steve

If you are emulating RedPhantom's set up, I noticed that your IOR on your Fresnel_Blend_2 is set to 1.4, not 25 like RP.

Yes, as hborre said, your IOR is too low and turning it black. raise that up and you'll see an improvement.

ok..... working on it now. I'll let you know

I changed the value to 25 and it got better... but not where it needs to be (see the pic). On a whim I upped the value more. Then much more. The result wasn't any different

The reflection looks like it’s working. You can see the construct in it. If you want to see more, you need to add things for it to reflect. In my sample, rather than the construct, I used a sphere with an HDRI image of a room to get something to reflect.

Also, It looks like your glossy color is gray rather than white. This will darken your metal. That’s not wrong, depending on the look you’re going for.

I don't know what the deal is, I just can't get the result I'm looking for. Redphantom, I love your example with the chrome shuttle and the flag. That's exactly what I'm trying to achieve, but I can't seem to do so. This is quite disheartening. I think I need to take a day or so to just try and puzzle out what I'm doing wrong

Like RedPhantom posted, your reflections look like it's reflecting as it should. You need to wrap either the construct or a skydome with an HDRI to see the full effect. Reflective surfaces need to reflect something like an environmental image.

Here is the shuttle with the plain construct (ground), like what you have set up. The shuttle looks similar to yours except you see the flag reflected on the side. Your plane area is flat so you wouldn't get a reflection from other portions.

Now, see what happens when I add sky and ground texture.

If you want the metal to reflect something, you have to have something there to reflect. Old firefly shaders would sometimes have a cheat with reflection maps that faked an environment to give the appearance of a reflection. Superfly doesn't have that option.

I tried that... Just on a whim, I placed a cylinder behind the wing, gave it a bright red color and rendered. It reflected it just fine, but the logo that I created with the texture and the mask didn't show. It seems like I get either the nice reflectivity or the logo, but not both at the same time. I'll go have a look again... there has to be something I'm missing

I got it! I had in my experimenting around with your parameters, Redphantom, changed my values on the "reflect" node. It's all good now, I think. Thank you everyone for all the patience and help!I would have never figured this out otherwise :)

Yay! Glad to hear you got it.