New Node: Mesh Direction Vector

InstaMAT Showcase
1

Hey folks,

I’m learning how to use InstaMat and I made my first Atom Node graph! yay. It’s just a modified version of the “Mesh Direction” mask, but will take any arbitrary direction instead of just XYZ, and has a little bit more control for the spread of the mask.

  • Direction - is just the normal direction to compare to. The mask will be strongest in this direction
  • Spread - is the “range” of the mask, the default 0…1 is the unmodified dot product but you could adjust this to 0.5 … 0.75 for example to get a sharper edge
  • Gamma - within spread, applies a power function. You can use this to change the shape of the falloff curve (just like Mesh Direction), < 1 means sharper falloff, >1 smoother falloff
  • Wrap Around – By default this goes from the perpendicular direction to the direction, if “Wrap Around” is true this will remap the range to the whole range, so 0 will be directly opposite the given vector.

direction_example
direction_example1591×1058 182 KB

(ignore the black specks, my test model has really bad UVs)

This can be useful for lots of things, such as faking “baked” lighting in a stylized material.

fake_light1
fake_light11582×954 180 KB

InstaMAT_Studio_j3qh4SI91b
InstaMAT_Studio_j3qh4SI91b1586×986 185 KB

Here’s the node if anyone else might find this useful:
MeshDirectionVectorExport.IMP (14.3 KB)

thanks!
Joel

2 Likes
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This is awesome! Thanks for sharing!

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Thanks for sharing the node with us! I think the spread is a great idea and it would be nice to add that to the original node as a value in degrees.

Pretty nice that you were able to build on the library node! I hope Polyverse will be integrated with MAT soo, so you’ll be able to share your node there :smiley:

2 Likes