ColorEdge

Description

ColorEdge is a procedural texture which changes the color along the VISIBLE edge faces of an object, allowing you to define color gradients and add noise effects.

We use it mainly applied as an opacity map, to soften the edges of roads over the terrain. This is a sample of a road, by default and using ColorEdge:

To define the visibility of the edges, you can apply an Edit Mesh modifier to the object, change to the Edge sub-object level and use the Surface Properties tools.

Be aware that ColorEdge may slow down if you apply it to a very complex geometry. Although we use some caches and buffers to speed up the calculations, the plugin must compare each texture point with all the edges and faces.

Installation

Copy the file ColorEdge.dlt from the appropriate "plugin" folder (we provide files for all versions of 3D Studio from 3.x to 8.x) to any plugin directory of Max or Viz.

Using the plugin

This plugin is a procedural texture, apply it on any material plugin:

Color Near Edge / Color Far Edge

The colors are applied to the points near or far from the visible edges.

Color Ramp

Defines the distances from the edge to build a gradient with the supplied colors. d0: offset, d1: ramp up, d2: width, d3: ramp down.

Noise

Add noise effects using the same parameters as the Max texture plugins. See 3D Studio's reference for more help (such as Gradient Map and others)