shader room?

some of the old poser sets didnt give a graysxcale bumpmap,

is there a way to make the albedo map grayscale, right there in the bump channel with multiply magic?

invert color doesnt help much.  there prolly some way to desaturate and dehue ?

 

thanks

Comments

  • mschackmschack Posts: 337
    edited June 2021

    Use a mixer to mix black and white, make the blender the colour texture map, then also add a curve filter to the blender to give some control

    c2bw.PNG
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    Post edited by mschack on
  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675

    kewl  thanks!

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,200

    I think Carrara treats it as a greyscale regardless because it has a separate option for a normal map, I just plonk my diffuse in it (or Albedo)

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,549
    edited June 2021

    Back when I was coming up with my plan to create shaders that work well with speed rendering, I was noticing that many color maps don't produce the best bump maps - the lightness (L) levels are often off due to the need to get the right colors in the color channel.

     

    A big example of this is hair, which is almost always darker than the skin, making it bump inwards instead of outwards.

     

    My fix was to

    1. Copy the image and give it a "_B" at the end of the name
    2. Open it in an image editor and remove the saturation (make it gray scale)
    3. Carefully select parts of the map that are backwards (Light where they should be Dark)
    4. Invert the value
    5. Adjust the Brightness/Contrast/Value to fit what I thought looked proper

     

    I still do a lot of tweaking with maps to get them how I want them to work in my shaders.

    Post edited by Dartanbeck on
  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675
    edited June 2021

    any tips for volumetric shaders?

    i feel like theres a secret to making a lightning storm with the marble patternn

    Farscape's starburst
    Andromeda's slipstream
    Star war's hyper space transition

    Post edited by Mistara on
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