Changed service providers and inadvertently deleted all the stuff that I had in the Free Stuff section in the process. The only one that I still had the upload files for was the Eye Shader. I'll slowly post them again as time permits. Guess I shouldn't do this stuff late at night! :) Mark

Mark, I just recently looked at the shader list for that eyeball & what a list! That has to be one of the most elegant & complicated shaders I've seen. Did you come upon the inspiration for this by chance or did you plan it from the outset?

What I really enjoy about this forum is the things that are shared and posted that I never would have thought of by myself. Quite a few posts back, Litst posted the beginnings of an eye type of shader. We went back and forth making suggestions and showing results on how to improve the results. Well, the one in the Free Stuff section is what I came up with in the end. Man, I get a lot of inspriation from this forum. People post questions or an image and I think, "Now how would I do that?" Then I sit down and mess around for awhile. Mark

Thanks, must have missed that interaction as I was away for a couple weeks. That too is why I like these forums, thanks to yours' & everybodys' input. Reason I asked was that I spent about 1 1/2 trying to come up with a shader to accomplish shown on the image at the left side. Nothing worked so I just used my base art (Illustrator, drop shadow with Halo, KPT VectorEffects for beveled type) to make a bump map & applied to my spline model to render the image at right. All the rest of the painting was done in Painter 6 by importing the eps art & using masks, various layering techniques & airbrushing to finish the illustration (I already had the 2D bits & pieces for production). It only took me about 1/3 the time to do that compared to making a special shader. Not only that, I saved considerable rendering time to boot. I did learn that apparently the height feature will not work on bump/depth information & I would have to make the spline model a "real" 3D object with extruded type. I opted to take the "KISS" approach for this project (talking to myself "Keep It Simple Stupid").

Couldn't get that image to post, try again.

Yep, speed is king. Should you want to mess around later, this is a perfect use for terrains in Bryce. Turn your art into a grayscale and then a lattice/terrain. Reimport into Carrara and apply a parametric shader that is a t-map of your artwork that you made the terrain from, and presto: finsished art. :)

Thanks, the terrain looks good (havn't used Bryce for so long I'd forgot that idea). Only problem is, my file increased by ten-fold. Guess I'll have to break down & get a new CPU one of these days.