I started out by finding whatever Vops/VEX tutorials I could. They mostly showed how to play around with the various facets of the shaders and gave me some really good ideas to work with and techniques with how to work with the shaders.
First tutorial, creating a lantern shader using luminosity of the grid texture to drive the subsurface of the paper.
Second tutorial, focused on using position to drive color, time to drive opacity, and color to drive specularity.
The third tutorial that produced images was the car paint tutorial. Here, I followed along and created a shader from scratch using vops. The shader starts with a lambert as a base and adds on specularity and reflection in two layers using a trace node multiplied by a fresnel node. There are two of these reflection sets added in so that there can be a blurred reflection and a glossy reflection to simulate a gloss over a base paint. In addition, there is a third reflection that is multiplied by a noise to simulate the flecks that are in car paint.
With these tutorials as a jumping off point, I started reworking a piece with three bundt cakes. Previously, I had used mountain nodes and cookies to model in the divots in a real cake that come from air bubbles bursting against the pan. I could not use a proper subsurface shader on this model because the mesh was so terrible and it took an ungodly amount of time to render. Now I'm using VDBs to create the holes in the mesh and it's coming out much cleaner. I can also make moon rocks!
With these tutorials as a jumping off point, I started reworking a piece with three bundt cakes. Previously, I had used mountain nodes and cookies to model in the divots in a real cake that come from air bubbles bursting against the pan. I could not use a proper subsurface shader on this model because the mesh was so terrible and it took an ungodly amount of time to render. Now I'm using VDBs to create the holes in the mesh and it's coming out much cleaner. I can also make moon rocks!
That's no moon...
Also I can make cheese.
Of course all things can really be solved with lighting. Using HDRIs is really an amazing technique. The next step is figuring out FLIP fluids for the icing on the cake. Then that really will be the icing on the cake!
