Hi I’m currently learning the Blender code base and I’ve been researching into the idea of creating a toolset for painting/sculpt tangents that can be used for anisotropic reflectance shaders. The toolset would also handle Normals due to their close relation.
I’ve just been looking at the code and can see that the Anisotropic Shader aren’t even using the anisotropic parameters. The Anisotropic BSDF isn’t even an option anymore in the Shader Editor anymore.
Will anisotropic shading be supported in the future? If so in what capacity? Will I be wasting my efforts continuing with this venture?
Here are the ideas that I was jotting down this morning.
Tangent Painting/Sculpting Tool Ideas
Image Editor
Operator: Convert Tangent Texture to flow-map or anisotropic direction
Operator: Convert gray-scale height map to Normal Map.
Tools: Various tools for painting tangents.
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Tangent Stroke Brush
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Tangents from spline
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Draw closed shape. Tangents will be created by projecting boundary points to a center line, in a direction normal to the boundary. Useful for creating wood patterns; useful for creating anisotropic gradients. We typically have radial, linear gradients but nothing in between.
Shader Editor Nodes
Extract tangent from UV Space texture
Either implemented as a texture socket expansion to the Tangent node OR a new node entirely.
Convert TBN Texture node
Will convert tangents normals and bi-tangent textures to other texture types. Could output a tangent texture to a flow map or anisotropic direction map.
3d Viewport
Visualize Tangent, Bi-tangents, alongside Normals
Paint/Sculpt Tangent Bi-Tangents and Normals directly on a mesh