distance tex falloff curve

[super gnu]

anyone suggest a way to control the falloff from near to far colours with the distance tex? it seems to be a linear blend at the mo, and i want something more logarithmic.

[nils_p]

Yeah, a curve fallof would be nice. Maybe for some pond ripples

[super gnu]

excellent suggestion.. i think the distance tex is a bit underrated at the moment.. very powerful.

but adding a falloff curve or gradient editor would make it much more.

[joconnell]

anyone suggest a way to control the falloff from near to far colours with the distance tex? it seems to be a linear blend at the mo, and i want something more logarithmic.

Could you use a gradient in mapped mode and feed in the distance tex? It'd give you a second layer of control between white and black.

[henning]

...or simply pipe it through an output map and bend down the curve

[kriscabrera15]

what he said V

[svetlozar.draganov]

Seams to work fine with Output-map with custom color-curve on my side - I suppose that it could be used to tweak the falloff of the distance texture.

[super gnu]

joconnel wins the prize!! well you all do, as an output map gives you control of the gradient, but combining it with a gradient ramp in mapped mode is fantastic!!




on another note, is it practical / doable to give the distance tex a memory or cache of some kind.. for animated geometry..? as in when the source object moves, the distance tex shades in all the areas it has been in previous frames too.

you would then be free to use it for footprints, tank tracks, bullet holes etc. etc....

now of course joconnel will pip in with a method to do this with distance tex already. thanks in advance Jo.

[joconnell]

The gradient ramp method seems to be great for a lot of things! Like if you're doing a lot of panels with a similar material, you can use a greyscale map put into the gradient ramp and then do a load of variations in colour using the same base bitmap. For the effect you're talking about doing trails and what not, the only automated way to do it is to use pflow to birth particles on the faces of your tread, set them to spawn by travel so you get a repeat of where it's been and then use this as the source object for distance tex. The snowflow plugin does something similar to this, but it bakes the result out to a series of bitmaps instead. You could do something similar yourself by putting your distance tex in the diffuse of your ground and then using render to texture with the vrayDiffuseFilter element to get a sequence of maps, then post process this in after effects using the time echo filter so it all builds up on itself.