By the time I had all the pieces together, I was weeks deep into pure mathematics and complex simulations — for a material that certainly wouldn’t look good enough to justify the sheer complexity behind the scenes. Relying on having everything procedurally generated might prove you’re well-versed in the software, but it definitely isn’t the best option if you aim for visual output. Moreover, the material no longer inspired me at all. So I dropped everything and went back to basics: a piece of furniture made out of wood.
Everyone knows impostor syndrome. Mine kicked in hard here — I’d felt like I needed to reinvent myself and prove something, when in the end none of it helped me reach my goal. It just kept me from focusing on the art.
SDF Nodes
Shortly before SDF was supported natively in Designer, I’d already built my own toolset — though it was only 2D, so it lacked some functionality. For the chains in the Chained Rune Stone material, I wanted to make use of the superb normals you can generate with SDFs. I quickly ran into a problem, though: the Shape Splatter v2 — the core node for the SDF system — doesn’t natively allow per-instance variation. That meant I couldn’t get a 90-degree shift around a certain axis per iteration, which was needed to avoid intersections and keep things realistic. Whether because of a technical constraint or my own lack of familiarity with the system, it just wasn’t possible to carry the data from scattering to the rotation function. I was left with a huge node and long compute times just to produce a single chain segment, when I needed at least two, ideally three or four, for organic variation.
