Surface Mixer!

[celgomez]

I might be being a bit slow, but as far as I can make out SURFACE MIXER only mixes the base colour of another surface, not its texture or mapping information with the surface that is using the shader.

If that’s the case then what’s the point of it! There are plenty of ways to achieve this without a whole shader for it.

If it does mix entire surfaces information including U.V mapping can someone please tell me how to do it!

I can find no information how to use this shader.

[kevman3d]

I don't think it would be able to translate UV mapped info to another object as far as I know (but I'll have a play and find out - Would be interesting to know for sure). However if you've tried, then its possible UV maps just won't work (after all, UV maps require a, well, UV map to map onto! ;) )

And its more then colour - What you have to appreciate is that Surface mixing does everything - That is Colour, luminosity, diffuse, bump maps, specularity...


However don't be fooled that this tool is just some kind of simple fader effect. You have the textures you can use to mix surfaces, and you can also add more then one surfmixer to your surface and blend in surfaces onto other surfaces onto yet other surfaces...

Here's one way that it can be very cool (I demoed this last night at our LWUG)

I created a polka-dot sphere texture, I then added surfmixer and blended across a crusty, bump-ridden old rock texture to make it look a little decayed. I added another surfmixer, and then used a fractal texture to blend across a more complex animated lava texture. In the end I had a very sexy decaying polka-dotted rock with lava flowing under its crust!

I can't even imagine how much of a headache it would have been to do that with multiple layers and alphas to get that effect with just one surface.

Another example of using it may be to add chameleon characteristics to a character and get its surface to blend into its background.

[celgomez]

Cheers for that Kevman. If you hadn't replied I wouldn't have checked my settings to find out I hadn't set a high enough opacity value!

Many thanks again

[ToonShady]

kev, u need to show some image of this. sounds interesting :)

[kevman3d]

I'll need to recreate this since its an experiment I did 'live' at the LWUG the other night (since it only really happened cause someone asked 'Can you have more then one SurfMixer on an object?' - It was the same guy who suggested using it to do 'chameleon' effects in fact!) :)

One day I'll learn its a good idea to take blank CDR's to meetings to back up any cool stuff I do!

Lemme plug my LW Beasty back in later tonight and render some out - At the moment, its off since I'm sharing the power supply with my other old box I use to do all my time-wasting internet stuff on! :)

[kevman3d]

Heres a screen shot, with VIPER - For some wierd reason my machine will work fine with VIPER, but rendering loses the bumpmapping mix, and well, occasionally I see one of the surfmixers disappear when I load the scene?

I don't understand? SurfMixer works fine on 2 other machines... One at work, one at the University.

Maybe I should completely purge 7.5 and re-install? However I really would like to know why its working in VIPER and not in the rendering. Anyone have any ideas?