Still trying to find a group who would appreciate this!
Its a node-material you can use for sculpting that shows real-time contour lines, primarily for landscapes.
I found it quite useful.
It’s at blendswap: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/78651
That’s pretty handy. Much appreciated!
can you set it up to make them at any spacing?
can the line instead be a rivioted seam material?
have you tried making normal maps with this?
I could make the black lines adjustable for the user (probably) but not the color bands. Material view has a limited ability to process a node material and I could not get color-ramps to work (it just defaults to one color). A shame, because I could make a much more powerful and flexible tool.
As you can see with the flatter examples, the line widths stretch out on the flatter slopes. The rivets would stretch out also. Besides, that would be a lot of work for one special material.
As for the normal map, no way. It uses a side-projected color map and every point on the landscape with the same elevation will inherently have the same color. As it was, I was kind of surprised I found a way to make this work at all!
OK, update. For some reason my original node-only method wouldn’t work and I had to go with pre-rendered gradients/contour lines, which was very limiting and tedious. But just recently I found that the method was working! Don’t know what happened.
Anyway, it was very easy to create a live normal-map coloring while sculpting.
@blueprintrandom: I can make the lines and gradients user-controlled. I already tried your normal-map request and it worked great! Now that the node-only approach is (supposedly) working I can do all kinds of stuff!
I will re-release the whole thing soon.
4/30/2015: Released 2.0 update on blendswap, same link as above. It has a normal-map coloring mode now. It think it is in object-space because the colors are with respect to the landscape-objects orientation.
