Gimmicked this up today...idea was to do a greeble effect that was totally proceedural. Has a couple Shader Ops functions but otherwise is Carrara 4 native. I've learned a bit, and I could make the stuff have more organization and more machine-like patterns now...but I had to start rebooting Carrara as the tree grew to monumental length (an efficient shader programmer I'm not!)

The rest is Anything Grooves and plane primitives.

Having fun with the shader.

WOW! Any chance you will enlighten us and post the shader, so more people can explore an develop this great looking thing? Maybe Eric Winemiller can even start creating Anything Greebles with your help (you are going to be RICH!!!! ;-)

TOXE had a great trick for doing that by the way. He found outyou can attach .txt documents here. Changing the extension of the shader (.cbr) to text and you can attach it.

But maybe you want to keep it to yourself...

Naw. I was intending to give it away to anyone who asks. Basically it's a lot of recursions of the "squares" pattern; most of them with "threshold" checked. Had to get a little tricky both to create large flat areas and to single out squares to apply other effects to. And of course, it is only height -- need to do another pass to put greeble on the sides of the greeble. I'd love if Eric got into something like this, tho: there's some shader functions that would be very handy, and probably require going into the SDK. I haven't purchased Veloute yet, tho -- there could be some cool stuff in there. I suspect, though, that Architools would be the real kick for greebling up a spaceship...

Nice!

Can you share a screen grab or 2? Or the Carrara file with the shader in it, maybe? (Please?? :D ) Looks great! I second the notion that Eric or Julien should add this to their ever growing list of tools.

It does look great! Greebles are one of the things that Carrara really does need. -Kix

-Kix

Try this...see if you can open the shader out of a zip archive. http://www.renderosity.com/artistdownload.ez?fileid=21622&key=220877

I downloaded it and will take a look over the weekend. Thanx!! :D

Makes for some great space junk. I appreciate you taking the time you spent adding so much detail to your Carrara greeble. It is a top-notch one.

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

The model in Amapi 7.

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

Very cool. Makes me think of RAMA. I've been playing with ideas, trying to figure out how to "stretch" the shader. ShaderOps "tile UV's" can make it cover more space. But what I'd really love to do is re-seed the random number generator on a per-tile basis. After all, nothing on this shader is hand-placed; it's all random numbers. Anyone want to ask Eric Winemiller if he could write something that re-seeds all the generators in a shader tree?

This looks really great! -Kix

-Kix

This is righteous! Not sure I can live without it!

Messed around a bit more. The shaders look fine when I re-seed the random number generators, generating new shapes within the same parameters. Having pattern functions that used absolute measurements instead of percentages would be quite a bit more useful, though. For everything, in fact; it's a nasty mess trying to scale something as simple as bricks to match objects of different dimensions.

Above is a new thing I dashed off, using the same basic functions as before.

These are looking great! Maybe you need to put out a set of shaders? Variations on this theme, with the rivets/hull plating (love that!) and the city-scape, and the space-ship exteriors and all.

Eh. I hasten to point out that everything I've managed so far could be replicated with simple image-maps. So far it's merely cleverness for the sake of being clever. There's an image in here soon, though. I'm working up a little series (first one is already posted, but over where the fairies hang out).

"I'm working up a little series (first one is already posted, but over where the fairies hang out)." So where do the 'fairies' hang out?

Tsss. In the 'woods' ofcourse. Everybody knows that. :)

No no no. That's where the teddy bears are having their picnic.

Okay, not really. The idea for this image series is to do foreground figures with some amount of realism, and backgrounds that are more unabashadly CG; making use of procedural and parametric functions, for one. Undetailed and lacking in human reference scale for another.

For this image I wrote a simpler greeble for the deck plating, and added another procedural shader to the Anything Grooves objects; it changes both color and highlight value via the Shader Ops "Squares" generator, and adds a bit of bump-mapping.

There are two lights; a distant light, and an Anything Glows object suspended over the girl just out of camera range. The StarBright stars were comped in with an alpha channel render.

The girl also has a bit of shader fun on her. The skin shader uses a multi-channel mixer to apply two colorized versions of the base texture from Thorne, with Fake Fresnel controlling the blend. There is a slight glow in the "away from camera" channel as well. In fact, all of the clothing has complex shaders applied to modify the texture maps; much of it using Fake Fresnel operators.

Working on ideas for massive concrete and rusted plates of steel now: for the next image in the series.

This is marvelous project! I can't wait to see more!

Thought I'd see how well ZBrush 3 could import a Carrara Pro 5 greeble.  Amapi Pro 7.5 couldn't open it because of the huge poly count.  But ZBrush 3 treated it like a regular tool.  Cool!

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

Quote - Eh. I hasten to point out that everything I've managed so far could be replicated with simple image-maps. So far it's merely cleverness for the sake of being clever. There's an image in here soon, though. I'm working up a little series (first one is already posted, but over where the fairies hang out).

 

The difference for simple image maps comes when you want to zoom in on your textures. At this point image maps could become blocky where as procedural should not.

It would be interesting to know how memory usage increases for lots of objects using the two different techniques.

This time around, I dragged the shader to Carrara's displacement channel rather than using Anything Grooves.  The poly count was around 800,000.  A smoothing of 6.  The displacement smoothing worked great for the curved edges of the cube.

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

Quote - Try this...see if you can open the shader out of a zip archive. http://www.renderosity.com/artistdownload.ez?fileid=21622&key=220877

couldn't find it!!!  :( any other way to get this?

Attached Link: Nomuse's Greeble

> Quote - > Quote - Try this...see if you can open the shader out of a zip archive. http://www.renderosity.com/artistdownload.ez?fileid=21622&key=220877 > > > > couldn't find it!!!  :( any other way to get this?

 

Here:  http://www.shonner.com/drafts/nomuse_greeble.zip

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

**Thanks for the greeble.  Can you post a screenshot of how you did the riveted panel one?
**

Free men do not ask permission to bear arms!!

Sorry...forum software ONCE AGAIN has decided not to email me about replies to a thread. Which just one of the reasons I'm at DeviantArt these days and only check in here once in a blue moon. Anyhow. Really lovely, Shonner. I love the way that rounded box looks. UVDan, I'm not sure I could even find the shader around any more. I remember more-or-less how it was done, tho. Something like two recursions of the bricks shader; one was set for the narrow channels, but the other was set for really wide "grout." The grout is specifically the spacing of two rows of rivets...which were in turn a checkerboard filled with gradients with cut-offs to make them small mounds right in the center.

It's what gave me the idea on how to texture this.  A very simple, almost non-greeble.

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

Thanks,  I appreciate it.

Free men do not ask permission to bear arms!!