Day 55 : New optimized glass shader

In the morning was binding a few characters skin, equipping them with weapons and painting weights on their horns, just like yesterday

Mr Ron came in the afternoon and pass me the cool shader he built, the first thing to go through is,
He created a attribcreate node with a complicated fit() expression on the X position

He then did a $TY*($DIST*5) expression on the Y position of the point node. The value (5) can be change for the height of the centre. Essentially it was used for the peak to fade gradually from the centre to the verge, so that the edge won't be that blunt, so that the audience won't realize where is the ending point of the waves

$CEY to shift back the geometry to the original pivot position. But remember to delete the channel afterwards else it will conjure jerky animation.

Here's the displacement shader Mr Ron built. The displacement pattern was driven by a cellular noise node. Or alternatively, you can assign a image for the displacement map.  

This super material has many parameters to fiddle around with, which also enables user to assign image map for varying purposes (diff/amb/spec/refl). Particularly the alpha para and alpha perp which i like the most, are meant to control the inner and outer opacity of the geometry, but the geometry requires thickness for it to work

The colour map used.

 

The best thing was this shader renders at superb speed, incredibly fast.

I learnt some lighting techniques, by using spotlight and distantlight with solely a diffuse contribution and a specular contribution for the other to bring out the highlight. I would also have to render the specular pass to create the sparkles effect in comp, hopefully we still have time to finish.

The rendered sequence