Procedural Shaders, my Beloved

HoudiniRedshiftShaders.zip

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Free! Take them! I want to see them made use of. I think the only one I did not end up with a render for was the rain shader.

The only downside here is that there is a bevel missing on the box used to render the shaders. Beyond this point I will write about my love for shaders.

My Love of Shaders

It is standard for 3D modeling software to have renderers that help visualize assets. There are two popular ways of making the assets look like they have texture. No. 1 is by unwrapping and literally providing the asset with a texture, usually done by an artist "drawing" the surface of the asset. No. 2 is to use a shader - a mathematical calculation, to which variables and values are modified to create a pattern resembling the desired texture. Both methods can also be used at once, but this post is a love letter to the mathematical generation of item surfaces.

Though I used shaders for basic projects in DCC such as Maya, my deeper interest started in a class dedicated to their development. We did two kinds of exploration, through Redshift and OSL.

• OSL: Mathematical expression

• Houdini Redshift: A collection of material nodes with pre-written mathematical formulas that can be swapped between and modified to create specific surfaces

  • This is the common method of creating shaders - various renderers have their own systems, (With similar baselines, like art software having 'make a box' tools) where values are mixed, matched, masked, and multiplied to create complex effects.

    
    

OSL_Explotaion.zip

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We started with the plant-in-planter project, and I was honored to have my individual work featured by my professor at the time as an example of what to aim for on his academic website. Additionally, I modeled the two plants on the sides and added them to the class file directory. It was awesome to see people in my class using them and walking down the rows of computers in the department building and seeing people using my assets long after the course ended.

(Humorously, I didn't know what an RBD simulation was at the time, so like any hard-working novice I placed each stone by hand.)

I found node-graph shader development in Rdshift to be extremely fun, and the shaders to be so beautiful. This is the first personal one I committed to doing a 360 render of. The bump map is a little messed up, but I still adore the refraction and choice of color here.

As the plant-in-planter project was created via node-graph, in our next work we were introduced to OSL programming. We were tasked with taking the knowledge we had gleaned and developing a shader using OSL.

An absolute highlight of the class was when I was messing around with a shader network and noticed that my shader looked like raw meat. I had taken an anatomy class that summer, and figured I should capitalize on the emotions the average person gets when thinking about raw meat and make it my primary custom shader for the course.

On the side, I created this shader:

Which were inspired by HALO! We had 343 Industries and Turn10 studios attend our class, and this was around the point when I learned what a technical artist was and that it was exactly what I wanted to pursue as my academic and professional VSFX concentration.

To conclude our programming class, we had to re-create our OSL shaders inside of Maya programmatically, and apply the custom parameters as attributes on the geometries, while also combining our custom shaders with our previously created newton's cradles as extra credit. Both were completed in separate classes under the same professor, and the goal was to unite the two unique and individual projects.

Once class was complete, I got into the hobby of creating shaders. I was very fortunate to be one of the people to figure out how to get our Maxon student license discount and install the right configuration of Redshift and Houdini on my personal device.

The upcoming break I made full advantage of the increase of our render farm's increase on the rendering time cap limitation from two hours to 8 and created this fun render:

With the encouragement of my professors and peers, I was able to create an additional final, graduation presentation demonstrating my secondary-to-technical-art concentration, shaders. It is the video at the top of this post, and all of my files are present as well for my peers who are sure to use them. I missed out on rendering only one, the rain droplet file, whose rain droplet mechanics were one of the last shader challenges I solved before my graduation from SCAD.

My personal highlight during this period of exploration was the flesh shader. It is not perfect, and could benefit from elements such as hair follicles and freckles, but it was incredibly fun to discuss with my peers.

I tried seeing if I could bake out the subsurface shading directly into a texture using Houdini at one point, too!

Don't worry, I continued making aesthetically pleasing crystals as well:

Before leaving SCAD, I also had the opportunity to take a real time lighting and rendering course, and I got to explore Unreal shader system, and under the same professor I got to utilize my love of shaders in order to create a very close tomato match in Maya:

(Created before the flesh/"pretty-pretty crystal" shaders)

My final time getting to render with my favorite, Redshift shader nodes before the death of my license(s) was that summer, as a gift to an artist. I used my twinkly star shader to create the galactic effect of their OC.

A shrunken-down, 5MB gif of a sparkly star shader in action:

(Modeling, simulation, and render by me)

(Side note: I am extremely proud of this cloth simulation. I want to wear it.)

Considering how cool I thought this shader was at the time, I was surprised to find that it was the first one I was able to create when I opened up the delightful, free, Blender to learn their shader system.

In conclusion, I did my utmost to push the limitations I had on rendering with the technology I had as an acedemic because my opportunity to experiment and create beautiful things using the resources I had was but a small window. Licensing prices are what they are.

Bonus - extra fun wiggle guy from freshman year: