“Designing Fictional and Special Effects Materials,” a slew of procedural maps can help you design both fictional and natural organic materials easily. Any one of the Procedural maps that are available for stills can also be used in an animation.
Almost all the maps have a Phase value that you can animate. Depending on the map, animating Phase will have a different effect, but it essentially causes any procedural map to move. In the sections that follow, you will see what maps to use with various naturally occurring materials. Although several maps are covered, keep in mind that these are just a starting point.
Other maps not discussed in this chapter might work for a given natural material. The best way to know for sure is to try one. The possibilities are limited only to your imagination. your 3D application ships with a host of great maps for building natural-looking materials. The best part is that all the maps, while producing random looks, also can animate just as “naturally.”
Determining which map works best for you depends on your situation. Although we will focus on Procedural materials, note that you can use other maps, such as bitmaps, for natural materials. As a matter of fact, some bitmaps work well for Natural materials, but Procedural materials provide the greatest flexibility for organic surfaces.
In the end, the combination of both Mapped materials and Procedural materials look the best. All the maps discussed here can be animated through the map’s Offset, Tiling, and Angle values. You can animate along the world’s XYZ axes initially or based upon the UVW Mapping coordinates applied to the object. Using the XYZ method, your map remains oriented to the local coordinate system of the object.
If the object transforms, so does the map on the surface. If you use a modifier such as Bend, however, the map remains oriented to the Local Coordinate system of the object. This makes the map appear to “pass through” Instead of a lot more twisted geometry hwimnida.