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Hey there,
I am trying to figure out a way to get water droplets on a surface without using geometry. So, lets say I have a bottle with liquid in it, lets assume it's a bottle of beer, hehe. Now, I have an object for the glass itself, which has some thickness modeled into. And then I have an object for the liquid which is penetrating the glass object slightly to render as an surface-surface-interface, like in the vray example section.
For the droplets I used to have some techniques of adding geometry droplets on the surface (pflow, scatter, placing by hand, whatever...). This DOES do what I need, but it's really lots of work to get the droplets just right.
Now it would be nice if I could replace the geometry-droplets techniques by a shader-based solution, probably using some form of displacement and/or normal mapping techniques.
So, my first attempt was to just use a vrayblendmtl to layer a "droplet"-material with normal map for the droplets (that I created with photoshop and zbrush) over the glass-material. For the reflection part this does work. But the correct refractions behind the drops that would be visible in reality (because of the droplets standing out of the surface) don't come out right, of course, since there is no real thickness in the coat layer. I also tried to copy the original geometry, put a droplet-displacement map on it put the water-refraction material onto it. This does work to some extend, as now the refractions get distorted correctly onto the surface of the glass. But this does not seem to be the best solution anyway. So, has anyone any idea on how to accomplish this? This should work as a general solution to render drops on various objects, since I have to do this frequently on different models...
Here is a custom mental ray shader, that looks like it does what I am searching for in Vray:
http://www.3dcg.net/software/minwetness
Hope you get what I mean. Any advices would be great.
Thanks in advance
Greetz Ben
I am trying to figure out a way to get water droplets on a surface without using geometry. So, lets say I have a bottle with liquid in it, lets assume it's a bottle of beer, hehe. Now, I have an object for the glass itself, which has some thickness modeled into. And then I have an object for the liquid which is penetrating the glass object slightly to render as an surface-surface-interface, like in the vray example section.
For the droplets I used to have some techniques of adding geometry droplets on the surface (pflow, scatter, placing by hand, whatever...). This DOES do what I need, but it's really lots of work to get the droplets just right.
Now it would be nice if I could replace the geometry-droplets techniques by a shader-based solution, probably using some form of displacement and/or normal mapping techniques.
So, my first attempt was to just use a vrayblendmtl to layer a "droplet"-material with normal map for the droplets (that I created with photoshop and zbrush) over the glass-material. For the reflection part this does work. But the correct refractions behind the drops that would be visible in reality (because of the droplets standing out of the surface) don't come out right, of course, since there is no real thickness in the coat layer. I also tried to copy the original geometry, put a droplet-displacement map on it put the water-refraction material onto it. This does work to some extend, as now the refractions get distorted correctly onto the surface of the glass. But this does not seem to be the best solution anyway. So, has anyone any idea on how to accomplish this? This should work as a general solution to render drops on various objects, since I have to do this frequently on different models...
Here is a custom mental ray shader, that looks like it does what I am searching for in Vray:
http://www.3dcg.net/software/minwetness
Hope you get what I mean. Any advices would be great.
Thanks in advance
Greetz Ben
) I think both methods are very good, but I have never seen anything done with procedural shader approaches that worked well. Just my experience and YMMV, but I did try very hard to make that work too - it's by far the easiest way. It never came close the kind of detail/realism I got with the other methods (like the one below, you can see a crop of the hi-res and the detail is pretty good IMO).
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