Melon Shader

Been a long time since I updated this blog, due to internet access.

So anyway, my school requires me to create a tutorial on some advanced aspect of animation. So I was thinking if I could do a tutorial on creating a watermelon shader procedurally. I was very inspired from a book on RenderMan that I have and it shows how to write a watermelon shader from scratch using code. ( Name of the book is The RenderMan Shading Language Guide by Don Rudy Cortes and Saty Raghavachary)

Though I don't want to code, I thought it would be interesting to cover the importance of procedural textures and the Maya hypershade and shading networks. So I looked up for a few reference images and started to work on creating a shader right away. Here's the result:

And here's the shading network for the above melon:

The current layers I have in the shader are: (from bottom-most, a noise layer, veins, dark green stripes and some fractal bump-mapping which looks over-used) I also added a ramp to create the poles of the model dark and black.

This is not a complete shading network. I plan to add a lot more to the network to bring out the subtle details of a melon. I was also thinking of exploring subsurface scattering, but at a much later stage if time permits.