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I'm looking for a way to soften the edge of a pathway. I was hoping to use the DIRT procedural as an opacity node on the edges. However with no detail and just a flat poly there is no DIRT layer that the proc. creates.

Any other ideas of how to do this? We use to have a shader in Native LW that would color the EDGES it was called eeGrit and Anything Goos.

If I bevel up the path giving me more edge at the corners, I can begin to get the dirt shader to recognize an edge and begin shading.

However if I run this into a material mixer or Opacity input I'm not getting any results. If I run the output of the Dirt into a ColorCorrect and INVERT the texture I get exactly opposite of what I want (edge2.jpg) One would think that without the invert I would get what I'm looking for...but all I get is black edges...What gives?

no body has any ideas? Bug?

edit: LWG solved

3dreamstudios wrote:If I bevel up the path giving me more edge at the corners, I can begin to get the dirt shader to recognize an edge and begin shading.

However if I run this into a material mixer or Opacity input I'm not getting any results. If I run the output of the Dirt into a ColorCorrect and INVERT the texture I get exactly opposite of what I want (edge2.jpg) One would think that without the invert I would get what I'm looking for...but all I get is black edges...What gives?

go with the "tolerance" parameter in the dirt node up and see whats done!

snip lwguru

LightwaveGuru wrote:

3dreamstudios wrote:If I bevel up the path giving me more edge at the corners, I can begin to get the dirt shader to recognize an edge and begin shading.

However if I run this into a material mixer or Opacity input I'm not getting any results. If I run the output of the Dirt into a ColorCorrect and INVERT the texture I get exactly opposite of what I want (edge2.jpg) One would think that without the invert I would get what I'm looking for...but all I get is black edges...What gives?

go with the "tolerance" parameter in the dirt node up and see whats done!

snip lwguru

I'm happy to hear both of you are seeing results, however I played again with every parameter in many different values and cannot get an edge opacity to be visible. Any chance either of you could adjust the parameters in this test scene to show me the values you are wanting me to try?

Or screen grab on your side? My path is showing 30'x7'x2" ( I don't care about the height, as I really don't want it but that's the only way I've got any edge out of the dirt node)

Thank you in advance!

I didn't try it, and only assumed it worked, because LWG said so. I originally suggested you just do this with UVs and get on with your dang life.

FrankPooleFloating wrote:I didn't try it, and only assumed it worked, because LWG said so. I originally suggested you just do this with UVs and get on with your dang life.

Yea you would think if LWG had a fix it would work. Maybe he was just guessing at the Tolerance...not sure. It doesn't do anything for me, nor do any of the other options for this technique. Life has moved forward, just wanting to learn for the next time! Thanks though.

Not sure I understand your problem, but in order to get the dirt node to work perhaps you should try the other way round, beveling the surrounding polygons rather than the path? Like so...
ADP.

alexos wrote:Not sure I understand your problem, but in order to get the dirt node to work perhaps you should try the other way round, beveling the surrounding polygons rather than the path? Like so...

IPR_image.jpg

ADP.

That's not bad! I was hoping to have some separate geometry that I could just push and pull around as needed on top of the layer I'm wanting to have fade through. Keeps the model cleaner in some ways for changes. But may look at doing what you've done here.

Thanks for the feedback.