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Possibly Unexpected Ways To Use Nodes

3dcheapskate

Engaged
Have you ever found an interesting, and possibly unusual or unexpected, way to use any of the material room nodes ? If you have then please share :)

I'll start.

The Cellular node (New Node > 3D Textures > Cellular) has given me several pleasant surprises.

The first one is that if you set mode 3, a large scale, and high turbulence, and plug that into displacement for a groundplane you can get a nice windblown sand effect. Or maybe tidal mudflats?

desertperhaps.jpg


Here's the setup as applied to the default Poser 6 groundplane to get the render above.

CellularSand.jpg


It's definitely worth fiddling with EVERYTHING on the Cellular node !
 

3dcheapskate

Engaged
You know those faked metallic reflection maps? The ones that look like swirly silver? You can make something similar with a Cellular node.
Mode 3 and a high turbulence value are the key.

cellularAsReflection.jpg
 

3dcheapskate

Engaged
But this is possibly my very favourite use of a Cellular node - glitterly multicolour specular highlights on insect/fairy wings !
Note that it's VERY dependent on the lighting and it's rather hit-and-miss, and there may be better ways to achieve this effect.
The render on the right doesn't use any Cellular (and Specular_Value is 1.0). Poser 9 renders with IBL and an infinite.

FairyWings.jpg


The key settings are Mode 5, RandomColor, and a very small scale, plugged into the SpecularColor input of the PoserSurface.
Multiplying two similar (but different - note the scale and jitter settings) Cellular nodes is something that hit me in the last half-hour - with just one, which is what I was using before today, the colours are too bright and too white. Since the colours are now darker I needed to increase Specular_Value

FairyWingSpecular.jpg

(edit - whoops! I forgot to multiply the wing transparency map with the Specular_Strength on my renders !)
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
Interesting tests. One of these days I'm going to really sit down and play with a lot of the available nodes in Poser so I can utilize the Material Room better.
 

3dcheapskate

Engaged
Here's an unusual one I just found. Using one 3D Texture node to drive random inputs of another 3D Texture node can give you some rather psychedelic results...

Psychedelic.jpg
 

sanbie

Noteworthy
Contributing Artist
Oh wow when I opened the image for a larger view...my eyes went all funny and it was like the image was moving...spooky!
 

3dcheapskate

Engaged
I'd seen this sort of thing a few times before, i.e. plugging one 3D texture node into the inputs of another 3D texture node. Traveler's 2009 (!) "Inside a Material 01 - Rusty Pitted Iron" (in the RDNA Poser tutorials forum) was a really nice step-by-step, showing the tip of the iceberg, and a definite inspiration.

One thing I discovered - my predictions of what would happen if I plug 3D texture A into input B of 3D texture C are usually so far off the mark that it's unbelievable ! I was actually trying to find a way to make the repeating pattern created by the cellular less obvious (yesterday's "Making 'Random' Procedural Shaders Less... Well... Repeating (PP2014/Firefly)" thread in the SM Poser forum) when I entered the realm of pschedelia...

Since the results are difficult to predict, please do post any interesting combinations you find here. :):alien:
 

3dcheapskate

Engaged
I was trying to use the cellular node to create large distinct patches of different shades of green, plus a turbulence node driving a ridiculously large displacement (60 inches). I had the intention of using a noise node or something like that to give small detail. But luckily I messed up...
I was using Porsimo's morphing ground with the 'Hills' morph set to 1, and here's the render that made me think "whoa! That looks like distant foliage on a hill":
500x500.jpg


Here's the shader:
shader.jpg


And here's a huge high res render I did of exactly the same thing. It could still pass for distant foliage I think:
big.jpg


I think I added the second turbulence node to get around the repeating pattern that 'Poser nodes that create a 'random' pattern inevitably produce.
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
I think 3dcheapskate's on PP2014, so can't try it out in SF. Maybe sometime in the near(?) future, SF will support micro-poly displacement.
 

3dcheapskate

Engaged
Miss B's correct - although I have Poser 11 I don't use it. I'm a micro-polygon displacement fiend, so I don't approve of the retrogradation provided by Superfly and iRay ;) ! (My proudest boast to date is that I made an 8' cube with an almost 8' displacement that gloops* wonderfully!)

Anyway, back to the present moment - I tried this latest cellular+turbulence material on a huge 2-dimensional polo mint (i.e. a flat circular plane with the centre cut out) thinking that I might be able to use it for distant forested hilltops inside an environment dome. It didn't look so good. It also didn't look so good on a sphere.

Hmmm... I wonder what it would look like on an 8' amoeba ?


*that's the technical term for the auto-perambulation mechanism of a giant amoeba.
 
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