Y-Phil posted at 1:33 AM Fri, 26 May 2023 - #4466414

Thalek posted at 12:55 AM Fri, 26 May 2023 - #4466412

I cannot remember if I ever posted my final version of the Material Layers overlay I decided upon or not.  It went from elegantly simple to somewhat complex to elegantly simple again, with the aid of @Richard60's logic nodes.  So, while I wait for a demo image to render, here is what I discovered about creating tattoos or "decals".

Excellent! It can be used to add a logo or whatever picture to a cloth, too.

Absolutely.  You can put a slogan on a t-shirt, a flag on a spacecraft, lettering on a sign.  If it needs to be shiny and plastic-like, turn the roughness down. On skin or velvet or non-shiny leather, it needs to be rough.  It appears to be much more versatile than the original technique, wherein Shana used Python scripts to create complex shaders to put tattoos on figures.  My material layers files, of necessity, still attach to specific materials like an .mc6 file, but it might be interesting to see if they can be reworked to be generic shaders like an .mt5 material file.

I don't doubt that someone like BagginsBill or Ghostship could create more sophisticated versions that would be more accurate in simulating a given appearance. But for a number of applications, this technique might work just as well.