VRayEdgesTex to blend geometry together

[JonasNöll]

Hi,

I use VRayEdgesTex with the option "Consider Same Object Only" turned OFF in order to blend over seams of different geometry. For example if you stuck several Megascans assets together you will get ugly seams at the connection parts because the normals are facing in other directions.
The solution is to use VRayEdges Tex with a very big radius, for example something like 1m, 10m and so on, depending on your scene scale. That works really good but the problem is that if using normal maps or displacement maps all the details will be smothed over.

So woulld it be possible for the VRayEdgesTex to have an option that basically only blends separate geometry together at the seam lines while leaving the overall geometry detail from normalmaps or displacement maps alone?

[kosso_olli]

Maybe using a VrayDistanceTex as a mask for the EdgeTexture might suffice as a workaround.

[JonasNöll]

Hi, thanks for the idea, though that works only in certain situations. For the masking the blend distance needs to be quite far and often times the geometry is stuck in each other quite tight.
Also the distance texture would need to manually add all parts to it and can't reference itself or it will run into a circle. In that case masking by VRayDirt would be easier probably but then it would be hard to mask really soft intersections.
I basically would require to have the same shader applied to all surfaces (with VRaySubObjectTex for assigning the correct diffuse/glossiness/normalmaps) and then just have the VRayEdgesTex apply to all the intersections to blend them over without messing with the existing normalmaps or other details.

[JonasNöll]

I'm basically talking about those kind of situations:

[stevesideas]

I'm having the same issue. Did you manage to resolve this? Would love to know how you did if so....thanks in advance.

[JonasNöll]

I'm having the same issue. Did you manage to resolve this? Would love to know how you did if so....thanks in advance.

Unfortunately not, I don't think its possible with the current tools without implementation from developers...

[^Lele^]

Unfortunately not, I don't think its possible with the current tools without implementation from developers...

We had actually taken a deep look at Unreal's Vertex Blending approach, along with this blender addon and it's essentially a setup one can get done in Max alone.
It would surely be advantageous to have it as a single toolset, but the way max works, the stuff would be all over the place, and we couldn't find a decent way about it from a workflow standpoint.
However, all that's needed is in there, between us and Max, if not prettily packaged.

Possibly an opportunity for a budding scripter?