#shader nodes

[bernie-buddy]

Procedural muzzle flash in Blender

[life-take]

ok screw it im gonna post my question bc i'm going crazy.

In Blender, I'm in a situation where I would like to work with multiple materials, all for a single object use-case. To explain better, I'm learning how to create materials and would like to try different materials on, for example, a cup mesh. Because I'm only focusing on materials that work for a cup, I want to keep everything in one blend file so I can easily compare my materials on the same object. (Think creating a suite of cup-suitable materials for a collection)

So in this case, I only want to see one material on the cup at any one time. Im not interested in assigning materials to faces. Also, because the materials are procedural and node-based, I like to work on each material on its own node workspace. (I.e., having them all in the same workspace and just using Mix Shader would be annoying and complex to navigate)

It seems like there is no layer-like "material visibility toggle" in blender where I can have 2 materials assigned to different slots? I get why it might not be that way (2 materials on the same face? yeah right), but what is the most efficient workaround?

Possibilities I've found are: 1) Duplicate object, assign respective material, toggle object visibility. Or 2b) Assign all materials to fake users, then just add/subtract materials to the object whenever you want to see one or the other.

Neither seems quite efficient. Is there a method people like to use when working on multiple materials in one blend file?

[famdoesvisuals]

And here it is moving, obviously had to render in EEVEE because I'm not made of money. Gotta admit it was fun making this one but I really suffered with the material here, it got a bit unmanageable towards the end.

The whole thing is done almost completely procedurally (only the HDRI lighting is an actual image), the spikes are made by first "spherifying" a plane in geo-nodes and then adding a funky cosine displacement on top of that, following the normals, that was mostly painless.

The material is a bit more involved, using a mask that's derived from a gradient made from calculating the distance to the center of the sphere (well, actually an Empty that's slightly off center.)

[spencerhall]

Procedural composition book texture made in blender

Comp book made using comp nodes

[totenrand]

Blender Displacement Node, Domesticated (very nearly)

[[NB. I was wrong, but very nearly right, this method only works if the mid point is zero, otherwise it turns the mesh inside out! I'll make a follow up post.]]

I feel like in every tutorial I've ever seen that used the Displacement Node in Blender's shader editor the person presenting the tutorial just fiddled about with the 'scale' setting until it things looked about right, and this is deeply unsatisfying to me because it feels terribly unpredictable.

Yesterday I had a thought out of nowhere, "What if the 'height' map was being interpreted as Blender's internal size units?"

So I set up an experiment, I made a 1m cube because by default Blender Units are set to 1 per metre, then I made the sides transparent, set up a quick scale with geometry nodes, and applied a Linear Gradient running through a displacement node to one face.

And it just WORKS! Right away the face slides diagonally from the one corner of the cube to the other, not clipping out the other side or anything!

So I wonder, why the hell can't I just divide the height input by 100 to get a 1 centimetre scale displacement?

And I works perfectly!

Why have we been fucking around with the scale setting all this time?

[egnevadesigns]

Blender 3D Nodes: From Beginner to Pro in One Article

Blender 3D nodes are fundamental components used in the Blender software to control and manipulate various aspects of 3D scenes. These nodes are like building blocks that allow you to create textures, materials, lighting, and more. Let’s take a deep dive into this and understand what Blender 3D nodes are all about. The Node-Based Workflow At the heart of Blender’s design is a node-based…

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[publicopinionrp]

After screwing around for A While trying to figure out how to get box mapping in world space that wouldn't flip out when the object got rotated or scaled, I eventually had to build my own node group for it. It hates angles that aren't almost 90, but for my purposes it works great. If there's an easier way to do it, I would love to hear about it.

The dirt is just a 3d noise texture running off the Position output of the Geometry node, which helps to hide the tiling of the concrete.

[wrongwarp]