Smaller projects
Over the past few months I haven't had any big projects, but I have been working on lots of smaller ones. None of these has been significant enough to write a whole post about, so I figure I should put all of them into one. The format will be a paragraph for each with the image at the top.
Donut render:
Everyone does one of these eventually. The most basic tutorial is how to make a donut. Mine is a little more complicated though. For this project I wanted to make a donut without any sculpting or modeling, only a shader on a basic torus. That's exactly what I did. The node tree is complicated, but I will try to break it down simply. 
Here we have the base color in the brown frame, the sprinkles in the pink frame, and the displacement/bump in the blue and red frames. For the base color I use several noise textures and a gradient texture. The gradient is set to either one or zero and set on the vertical axis. This is what makes the separation between donut and frosting. For the sprinkles I use the gradient to determine where they should be placed and I subtract two noise textures from each other to make each separate sprinkle. The bump and displacement are all the colors with some math to make sure they work together well. Finally we plug everything into the bsdf and presto, donut.
Portals:
This next project was to see how portals might work with only a proximity shader. There are two spheres here, it's not really going through the portals, but there are no portals anyway. That is a flat plane with a texture. This one was actually a bit easier than I first thought. As it turns out, if you take the dot product of an object's texture coordinate, it gives you the distance to the other object. After that it was only the work of mixing the colors, roughness, and emission to achieve a portal effect.
Space:
This project is one I'm actually quite proud of. This is another shader project, but this time instead of a donut or portals, I'm generating entire planets. Each of the planets shown here is a flat sphere. All of the mountains, craters, clouds, and atmospheres were entirely made with math.
This mess is the shader tree. The ones in black are the basic shared assets, the ones in grey are the clouds, the green section is the terrain, the blue is the atmosphere, and the yellow box is the lights. The clouds are a fairly simple noise texture that's been overlayed over the terrain. The atmosphere is what gives the planets the appearance of being in a marble. This is done by using the fresnel with a glass shader. The terrain is mostly another noise texture, but this one has been put into several color modulators and then put into the color, roughness, and bump maps. Finally is the lights. They aren't really shown in the final render, but the dark side of the planets actually have cities that will light up when there isn't any more light. Even though it didn't show in the final render, I still might use it as an asset later and it could be quite helpful. I had a few more things I worked on, but they were for clients and so I can't put them here. I might use this multi-project format more often as it gives me the chance to highlight my smaller projects that I work on.
Space:
This project is one I'm actually quite proud of. This is another shader project, but this time instead of a donut or portals, I'm generating entire planets. Each of the planets shown here is a flat sphere. All of the mountains, craters, clouds, and atmospheres were entirely made with math.
This mess is the shader tree. The ones in black are the basic shared assets, the ones in grey are the clouds, the green section is the terrain, the blue is the atmosphere, and the yellow box is the lights. The clouds are a fairly simple noise texture that's been overlayed over the terrain. The atmosphere is what gives the planets the appearance of being in a marble. This is done by using the fresnel with a glass shader. The terrain is mostly another noise texture, but this one has been put into several color modulators and then put into the color, roughness, and bump maps. Finally is the lights. They aren't really shown in the final render, but the dark side of the planets actually have cities that will light up when there isn't any more light. Even though it didn't show in the final render, I still might use it as an asset later and it could be quite helpful. I had a few more things I worked on, but they were for clients and so I can't put them here. I might use this multi-project format more often as it gives me the chance to highlight my smaller projects that I work on.
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