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In Cycles can I use the amount of shadow cast onto an object as a Fac. input of a mix shader?

This would be useful for setting up a Frost / snow material that is visible in shadowed areas but has melted in lit areas.

I know I could do it by baking shadow maps for the various objects, but I wondered if there was a procedural way to do it.

Maybe if I could create a vertex paint layer using the shadow info this could be used and would save the texturing (my scene is already quite complex - several hours per frame)

Any thoughts?

Ollie83
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  • Related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/5845/599 and http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/701/599 – gandalf3 Apr 02 '14 at 18:38

1 Answers1

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No, this is not possible in cycles.

As a workaound, you could render a diffuse pass in a different renderlayer and then use that as the mix factor, see Is it possible to use the output of a Renderlayer in the material nodes of another RenderLayer?

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gandalf3
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