Who actually uses Falloff in their textures?

[Shade01]

I use falloff a lot in my textures, in particular when creating architecture, when I want have something like a dirt texture to appear only at the bottom of a building for example, or the top of an object. it also works with negative numbers too, don't know if people use it that way. I'll try to post some quick and dirty examples.

[ChrisBasken]

I have fun with it making hills. Take a big flat poly, subdivide it once or twice, make it a subpatch, then bring it into layout.

There, give it a displacement procedural, like the venerable Fractal Noise or something that looks good, and give it as high a subdivision count as you can get away with. Set it to subdivide before it displaces, so you get the maximum crumply effect.

Then add a falloff, so the displacement drops off as it approaches the edge of the poly. Voila -- you have a mountain.

To gain finer control, freeze and re-subpatch it a couple times in modeler, then lower the subdivision count in layout to something manageable. The set it to subdivide after displacement for more gentle, rolling hills.

Of course, you can do the falloff trick with gradients, too, but this is just a quick example of a use of falloff.

[leigh]

Thanks guys :)

Yeah, it's actually mainly because of weightmaps/gradients that I struggle to see why people would use falloff, when the gradient gives you more control.

:shrug:

But the displacement for mountains, that's a cool idea :thumbsup:

Shade01 - funny, I actually have only ever used Falloff once, and it was a negative number hehehe :)

[Steve Warner]

This may be a hold over from the days of yore, kept in the program for backwards compatibality. :shrug: People often gripe about LightWave's interface being ugly. They forget that Lightwave was developed on the Amiga running at 60Hz. The display was optimized for use on this system in order to minimize the flicker often seen on the 1084 monitors. There's really no need for it today. It's just a hold over from days gone by.

[webfox]

It used to be used a lot when you wanted to put a label on an object with planar projection, but because the label was infinitely projected along an axis, it would come out on the other side of the object as well, but reversed. If you set the falloff, then it would fade to nothing before showing through.

I still use it for things like that from time to time.

[twidup]

depends on the effect I want ;)

a little trick is to create a layer with some falloff, and then turn off that texture layer, and add a gradeint set to previous layer above it, then use your 0 to 1 values to define colors and such based off the previous layer...quick, simple fire ;)

[Kvaalen]

I sometimes use the falloff on the texture of a volumetric light when I make sci-fi type engin exausts or fires.

[leigh]

Steve, thanks, you echoed my thoughts exactly :D
Apart from the examples that ChrisBasken and Webfox have mentioned, there really isn't all that much use for it since there are more efficient ways of controlling this type of effect :)

Thanks for the other suggestions, Twidup and Kvaalen - I'll try those :thumbsup:

[ChrisBasken]

I completely agree that anything you can do with falloff you can probably do easier with gradients.

I suppose the question could be, is there anything you can do with falloff that can't be easily done with grads?
:shrug:

[Halsu]

I use falloff kinda often - one nice thing about it is that it's not tied to the geometry, and it works also with world coordinates, which makes it easily animateable.

I.e. the foam on my SeaGen sea is just a noise texture layer with some Y falloff, above the water. When the wakes are displaced enough, their tops come withing the textured area... it's simple but it works.

Also in my Skygen, the sun and moon halos are done with a value texture with falloff as a base for a gradient.

Third thing that comes to mind: one can get some quite nice effects by moving a texture with spherical falloff through a polygon. I can make an example of this if you wish.

[Halsu]

Here's a example scene of the above: it's fun to just change the procedural type, and do a viper preview -

eki.3dfightclub.com/Falloff.zip (http://eki.3dfightclub.com/Falloff.zip)

[leigh]

Halsu - that's really cool :thumbsup: Thanks a lot :)
That's also a great use of the Previous Layer gradient :D
Thanks a million for sharing that one :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

[Chruser]

Ditto. Great stuff. :)

[leigh]

If you don't mind, Halsu, I am going to use that concept to demonstrate that type of falloff in my book :)

[kretin]

Gradients and weightmaps don't replace falloff, but can often be used to create the same result.

I use falloff all the time. It's benefits are that it's not tied to geometry as weightmaps are, and to localise an effect you don't need an item to tie it to as you do with gradients.

It's far quicker to set the coords and falloff for an effect than to create a null and a gradient.

That said, gradients can produce a more complex effect at the expense of a little more work.

Also using a gradient as an alpha bumps up render time as it's gotta process at least 2 surface layers instead of just one when using falloff.

[SplineGod]

Originally posted by Leigh
Anyone?

*scratches head*

I'm struggling to understand what the use of falloff is when it is so restrictive. Surely it's much easier to just use gradients/weightmaps/images to control something like the falloff effect instead of using the falloff options in the Texture Editor?

It's just that its effect is so linear, and you can't really give any variation to it whatsoever... I'm not entirely sure why its there :shrug:

Please let me know how you use this, because I am struggling to think of some decent examples for this section of the chapter that I am currently working on. I've been stuck on this one all day now :surprised
I also use falloff all the time which is linear as you say. Most of the time that works fine for most things. Ill use viper and the texture position slider to quickly adjust where the start of the texture is and I can get some nice results with blending procedurals very quickly. I use the procedural called Value in this way. I dont like creating a color gradient by having to place a null as a reference point. Instead I quickly use Value with falloff and then add a gradient on top of that. By adjusting the Values position and falloff it automatically changes the gradient.
I have a rig on my website where I deform the bottom of a spinning tire using a displacement map with falloff. I also use falloff in the ways Halsu mentioned even to create real foam on objects using textures to modulate the size of HVs using falloff.
Pretty much all of the following examples use falloff in some way.
www.3dtrainingonline.com/examples/seafoam.mov
www.3dtrainingonline.com/examples/boil.mov
www.3dtrainingonline.com/examples/grass2.mov
www.3dtrainingonline.com/examples/grass3.mov
www.3dtrainingonline.com/examples/nebula.mov
www.3dtrainingonline.com/examples/paint_peel.mov
www.3dtrainingonline.com/examples/shockwave1.mov
www.3dtrainingonline.com/examples/shockwave2.mov
www.3dtrainingonline.com/examples/splat.mov
www.3dtrainingonline.com/examples/splat2.mov

[wgreenlee1]

Great examples Larry!



Falloff is your friend....

[Halsu]

Originally posted by Leigh
If you don't mind, Halsu, I am going to use that concept to demonstrate that type of falloff in my book :)

No problem whatsoever, glad you found the example useful ;-)

[CG.p]

Originally posted by Leigh

Apart from the examples that ChrisBasken and Webfox have mentioned, there really isn't all that much use for it since there are more efficient ways of controlling this type of effect :)


Sometimes entering a falloff once is faster than painting weight maps for a dense mesh.

The building was a good example. Setting a texture to fall off a few inches above the ground is faster than even: loading it into modeler again - selecting all those points (assuming they even exist around that height) - setting the values (not even taking the time to brush them on).

Yes, gradients give you more control...but then a high res texture map would be even more control than a gradient. :)

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