Thesis Project: Robot Shaders

This week I did a lot of work that will save me some headaches further down the road.  I finished up doing the initial texture painting of the Robot model just so every piece of geometry could have a texture map associated with it.  I had to deal with some corrupted Mudbox files, which is never fun, but eventually, I got something stable that would work for me.

After that, I had to figure out how to be able to link the 53 individual shaders so that they would be easy to tweak down the line.  I wound up at first creating a master shader with the basic overall settings.  After that, I created another shader that I called a "starter" shader.  I then linked certain values like sampling, glossiness, and others directly into the master shader.  For the starter shader, I also created three layered texture nodes and linked them to the diffuse color, reflected color, and reflectivity attributes.  I then linked the colors of those individual layered texture nodes back to the master shader

Basically, I was then set to copy the starter shader and the starter layered texture nodes, do some reconnecting, add the texture files, and that was it!  They were then connected to a master shader ready to adjust the color across all 53 shaders with ease.  In the end, if this works the way it should, I'll either love myself or curse myself if it doesn't work out.

Here are a few test renderings of the robot posed with full textures and shaders applied.  There is a lot of tweak work to do, but I am now set to finish this guy off.