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JDex
11-14-2007, 11:43 AM
I'm working with a provided realflow mesh and trying to find a good means of adding additional detail at shader time... I stumbled across this blog entry (http://www.xsi-blog.com/archives/125) and have been trying to come up with how it was used...

It's an operator that applies the mesh normals in real time to vertex colors, pre-render. I was wondering if anyone had some ideas on how this could be used for calculating sine waves or other shader based manipulation of normals that would look like the details of moving water.

This doesn't need to be app explicit, more theory based. Anyone have any ideas on what they may have been using this for?
playmesumch00ns
11-14-2007, 01:42 PM
If the original surface was just a plane, you'd know what the normals were: (0,1,0), so I'm guessing it must be something to do with driving the exact scale of the displacements or bumps based on the animation of the surface? Or maybe placing foam elements on hand-animated crests? Without seeing any images it's kinda difficult to guess!
JDex
11-18-2007, 07:50 AM
Thanks for the hint mate... I've not had any real luck figuring it out yet, but I did manage to get decent results without their technique. Hopefully it will come to me one day.
playmesumch00ns
11-19-2007, 01:28 PM
You'll probably end up finding it was something really mundane that never would have been any use to you anyway :)
mr Bob
11-19-2007, 10:19 PM
Apply a noise with different values to each of the Red Blue and Green channels. Then use that colour value to move the geometry along the normal , that will give you the extra detail you need. It should be pretty simple I would give you some help but I havent used xsi in years.

If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of normals , noise , sin waves to create oceans. You should use houdini as its very easy to construct a SOP network where you can add/ delete normals, layer up sin waves, split off the RGB channels and displace geometry along normals using different noise functions for the Red green and blue channels.
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11-19-2007, 10:19 PM
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