Hey Jhubbard. Nice progress on your jelly-dude!

For creating a cool shader for the translucent 'dome' look into a mental ray utility node called the SAMPLER INFO node. Its super useful for producing some very convincing lighting effects. If you'd like I'll post some possible uses and workflows for using it. I promise you, once you start using it you won't be able to stop!

Dave

Even though this aint my thread, go on, you know you want too!!

Great work Jhubbard. I really like the way the tentacles have been done. It would be great to get some more of those smaller tendrils hanging off of the larger arms in the dome area, though I am sure that you are working on this.

Oops! Its actually a Maya node and not a Menta Ray node but it works with both renderers. The easiest way to use it is when you want to create a rim of light on a particular piece of geometry ... but it really is capable of SO MUCH more! Try this ...

In HYPERSHADE create a ramp. Now drag and drop the SAMPLER INFO node on top of it and choose OTHER when picking a connection. This will bring up the CONNECTION EDITOR. On OUTPUTS choose FACING RATIO. On INPUTS choose U COORD. Now set the ramp to a U RAMP under its attributes. Now just drop that ramp onto a lambert (or whatever) and plug in into ambient color and plop it onto your geometry. Adjust the ramp colors to taste.

:beer:

sweet im at college atm but i will give that a try when im home, sounds like its cool. Thanks for the pointers guys, ive added some detail to the actual inside of it last night but i will post a render once ive done a bit more work n tried that sampler info node.
Hopefully will get some interesting results.
Later
Josh

o btw arran the detail i added was those bits you were talkin about,

Looking forward to seeing your latest render - this is a great idea for a project by the way. It is nice to see someone tackle something a little different.

swanky monkey i tried that emthod u talked about butit didnt work,
the first prob wos for facing ratio i couldnt select the U coord as it didnt let me it wos shaded out (it wos called Uv coord, is that the same thing?), secondly did u mean when connecting the lambert to the ramp set the conection for amient colour i wosnt quite sure but thats what i did, i just got a shpere with a bunch of crazy colours in a swirl. in the end
U dont think u could just post up what that result should be like cos then i can fiddle untill i achieve. Or maby a screen or yer hypereshade with all the inputs for the lambert. It would be cool to get this to work because my shader atm is onyl temp, +doesnt looks very good.

jhubbard


yes its the same, just open it out there is a '+' sign next to uv coord then attach.

As Swanky says its a very useful shader, I usually apply this to surfaces that are of a velvet texture so you get that sheen look. As Swankymonkey also stated its useful generally for lighting.

Also try playing with the ramps attributes, under the drop down menus

Jay

heres an example of velvet and a possible look for a microbe or something glowing thats alive...these took a matter of five minutes so excuse the crudity

Jay

and a jelly thingy

Jay

Thanks Jay!

Once you get it working right you can expirement with all its possibilities. For starters set the ramp to just black and white so you can see exactly whats going on.

Post what you come up with!

Dave

Absolutely, Dave

I was just thinking about these utility nodes and although I get to play with them from time to time, I feel I still dont scratch the surface, I think a 'STICKY' thread somewhere would be useful to share ideas alike on this type of thing, just for shader nodes, though MR and Software as I think alot could be learned


Cheers
Jay

Great Idea!!!

ok sweet guys im havin more sucess here, but jay how did u get such a bright colour on yer jelly render, because due to the transparency i think my colours r gettin dimmer and hae less radiencce did u bump up the incandescence or did u usea blinn n put the eccentricity up? Thanks

i was trying a way round this too Jhubbard i was getting good results i used a simple blinn upped the ambient n slight incand.
Also a small glow too.