Edge

Category: mental ray > Materials

Shader Family: Surface Material

Output: Color

Bump mapping is a powerful tool for suggesting geometric detail when such detail would be impractical as actual geometry. Two situations in particular cause a bump-mapped surface to look fake: when the profile edge of the surface looks too smooth, and when shadows falling on the surface look too smooth.

The Lume Edge shader remedies the first of these problems by roughening or blurring an object's profile edge. The Edge Shadow shader remedies the second problem by roughening the edges of shadows falling onto the object.

Lume Edge works by making the object transparent at its profile edges. You can control how much of the edge should become transparent, how blurry the edge should be, what kind of noise affects the edge, and how the surface color affects the edge.

Note that Lume Edge only works on "profile" edges, that is, edges that curve away from the camera. For example, Lume Edge applied to a cube would have no effect. Also note that this shader does not work on concave objects.

Name	The name of the shader node displayed in the render tree. Enter any name you like, or leave the default.
Surface Material	Controls the surface color of the edge.
Transparency	The amount of transparency used on the edge.
Amount	Controls how much of the edge is transparent, and thereby how rough the edge will appear to be. Larger values cause deeper cuts into the profile, while smaller values cause less of an effect. A value of 0.0 essentially disables the entire effect.
Blur	Controls the fuzziness of the edge. A value of 0.0 gives a sharp edge line, while a value of 1.0 causes the entire edge region to be blurred.
Relative to Object	Controls whether the edge effects are relative to the object coordinate system.
Relative to World	Controls whether the edge effects are relative to the world coordinate system.
Noise Influence	Controls whether or not the irregular edge profile is influenced by noise.
Relative Noise Influence	Sets the relative influence that the Noise effect has on the profile edge, as compared to the Color effect. When specifying Influences, the ratio of the influences is all that is important.
Roughness	Controls the amount of noise for the edge profile.
Scale	Controls the size of the largest clusters of noise.
Diffuse Influence	Controls whether or not the irregular edge profile is influenced by the diffuse color.
Relative Color Influence	Sets the relative influence of the effect (see above).
Diffuse	The same color used by the illumination shader.

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