layered shader (material)

[andy.engelkemier]

this was requested in 2013, but the person had it in one of those "here's my list" kind of posts instead of posting them separately. :/

I recently had to do a material that is a bit interesting. It's hammered metal, but with a paint coating on it. The dips don't have any paint on them, so those just look like metal. The higher points are painted a color.

So I need to mix a metal material with a painted material who both have the same bump map. Preferrably I could mix those With the same bump map whos only difference is a clamp on the color range, so instead of a nice smooth bump, it just cuts off more sharply in the middle.

My preference is also to allow the layered shader to include a layered shader as well with each map allowing it's own texture coordinates.
The reason for this would be having a material like I described, then maybe a chrome logo stamped in it. Instead of splitting the surfaces in your modeling software, you could create those breaks by using a simple texture map.

I'm not sure if keyshot allows multiple texture map channels because it's not all that commonly used, but I would use it from rhino, which does allow for that, or 3dsMax/Maya/other animation software.

This would also give me a reason to want a falloff map. What's a falloff map you ask? This is basically a gradient map that is based on the surface angle facing the camera. You can adjust the curve of those as well. This is a great way to achieve a more realistic car paint. I know how people Love to see car paint. Many of those have what is referred to as color flop. At a certain viewing angle, maybe a whitish color will look a little pink or green for a pearlized look. That's a somewhat extreme example.
But you could also do some really creative things like making a product look like a toon material at certain viewing angles, and realistic at others.
The possibilities here are only limited to your creativity. Well...that, and your available render time. It took Vray quite a while to get their render time down with mixed/layered materials. But that's how I've done graphics before that include chrome. You can layer material upon material using a stylemaster to create masks for the graphics exactly how they would print them. It's kind of dumb to waste your time doing that for a still frame because photoshop is so much faster. But for animation it's gold. The only way I could do that in keyshot now is render once without, render once with a mask applied, so black and white flat materials only with no contributing light from the environment or other lights, then once as chrome. Put that all together in AfterEffects. But you'd have to do 3 sets of animations? That would likely increase youre render time nearly double (masks and Only chrome would be faster, my math isn't That bad).

hopefully some people agree and we can get these guys going on this.

[guest84672]

The material graph KeyShot 6 should address this.

[edwardo]

ooooh, can't wait! Any other hints whats coming in KS6? 

[andy.engelkemier]

well I'd be happy to beta test that for you.

[br3ttman]

ooooh, can't wait! Any other hints whats coming in KS6?

I can't wait either.  I'm seeing a lot of hints on the Forum today for a bunch of nice features coming out in KS6!  Are you sharing an ETA on KS6?

[soren]

The "Falloff Map" can be created with the Color Gradient procedural. It has a camera mode where you can adjust the color based on the angle between the light and the surface normal. This is already available in KeyShot 5.

[andy.engelkemier]

oh good one. Although, I wouldn't find myself using it often outside of a mix map. Can you apply textures as color stops? Because that would be helpful. But if it's just color, then I can only find limited uses for it without layered shaders.

[Despot]

I'd be deliriously happy with the ability to just drive roughness values with an image or procedural...

J