Blue Cheese Shader

[John.McWaters]

What geometry is supposed to be plugged into the distance map for the material 'L_Cheese_Complete'? It's part of the 'MASK_Cheese_Mold' that's plugged into mask 1.

[pokoy]

Was it empty when you opened the file?
Either way, it should be cheese_mold_distribution or something like that. This map controls the general distribution of the shader mold on the surface and currently   it masks out only a small part of the mesh so it can also be disabled without affecting the general look too much.

[Jonathan.b]

You're welcome! Hope it makes sense, if not, just ask.

The flat cut surface is a quick and dirty solution, to look good from all angles it would need a blurred transition. I didn't want to make the file more complex but it could probably be easily done with data channel and/or a vertex map. But if you're going to use a scanned mesh it's probably not important in your case.

yes I rely on the scan to give me the details :)

[pokoy]

Back in office, adding some thoughts and 'disclaimers' I forgot to mention when posting the scene:

- based on what you want - high-res cheese hero asset or just another item on the table - your mileage will vary. I have not really checked different POVs, different lighting conditions etc so it's perfectly possible the shader will 'fall apart' when using in your scene
- I tried to use translucency but felt it was the wrong approach, SSS was faster and better to control IMO, if you think the look is off, try translucency/volumetric scattering instead
- play with the SSS depth parameter, lowering it will make the cheese more solid, probably needed depending on lighting
- reflection may be too high with too much gloss, currently the cheese looks quite 'moistly' (not sure if it's the right word here), having barely any real-world experience with this kind of cheese I can't really tell...
- with animation, you'll have to change displacement to scene units based, currently it's screen-space based
- I have used one of the photographic LUTs, using a different or no LUT at all will definitely produce a different (worse) look... you will probably have to tweak the shader then

I hope it's giving some a good starting point, or even an example of how *not* to do it if you don't like the result ;)

[Achilles3000]

Penicillin you can get from different food.

Peaches and so on :).

Great Shader tho.