[Bf-committers] Cycles shader interaction

Tobias Oelgarte tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com
Tue Mar 20 23:48:38 CET 2012


In the recent weeks I did various experiments with Cycles and tried out 
various combinations for shading and materials. Even so I'm quite happy 
with most of the results, I'm not so happy with the "once shader always 
shader paradigm". That means: Once you have the output of a shader node, 
you can only combine it with other other shaders using the add- or 
mix-nodes for shaders. This means that you have little to no control 
after a shader output.

In BI you have the ability to use ramps to manipulate the result of the 
shader itself. For example you could give dark areas a violet tone, 
while giving brighter areas a more yellow color. You can also feed a 
shader with the output of another shader and so on. At the moment this 
seams not possible with cycles on material base. You can only use 
compositing to apply such effects as a postprocess with using index 
masks and similar stuff. This is difficult to set up for larger projects 
with different materials, if not even impossible, if not done on shader 
level.

Are there any plans to allow more control over how shaders can interact 
with each other?

Greetings from
Tobias Oelgarte


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