There are times where I think the work I am playing and practicing with are "irrelevant in the long-term." Make haste, young'uns! You do not stay young for long!

Under the video tutelage of Blender Master Smeaf, I envision to create expert animations on Blender to earn myself a respectable secondary income. Why not get a desk job which pays reliably? I hate going outside. Plus, anything outside of creative work bores me, despite its luck-reliant nature as a job.

Anyhow, back to Blender. My first milestone of this path is to create a graphical special effect that 'spawns' objects of complex geometries from textured liquids appearing out of thin air.

Here are the shading geometry nodes I need to cook up such an effect:

• Mix Shader for, well, mixing two shaders by factor ratio

• x2 Principled BSDF nodes for customizing fundamental texture details

• x2 Texture Coordinate for mapping 2D textures on 3D geometries

• x2 Noise Texture for simulating flat appearances of uneven surfaces on objects

• Map Range for controlling how 2D textures look in 3D models

• Mix Color for simply mixing two colors together

• Vector Math node set to Add for changing XYZ vector values

• Bump node for creating the illusion of depth and texture on a 3D surface

• Math node for non-vector mathematics

For independent Blender objects, you will need these for the effect to play on:

• A 3D object targeted for change

• An Empty to dictate the location of shading effects

• A wireframe for moving your multi-part object (optional)

Cooking time! First thing to do is set one of the BSDF nodes' Alpha value from 1 to 0, which sets their visibility from viewable to out--of-sight. Connect both BSDF nodes to the Mix Shader node - transparent one to the 1st slot and default to the 2nd.

Nothing in the 3D space is going to disappear then reappear if nothing is specified to disappear from the beginning. Specify which one Empty will cause the object to become visible in both your Texture Coordinates.

Next, connect one directly from the Object slot to the A slot in Mix Color. From my own testing, changing the Mix setting to Linear Light reduces the effect range of the cutter, though I am aware there are more advanced background differences. To give the mixing textures' edges a more liquid appearance, have the remaining Coordinate pass by a Noise Texture node set to 4D before reaching the remaining B slot of the Mix node.

Then connect the Mix Color node to a Vector Math set to Length. This node generates a length value according to the cutter location, which will be obtained by the Map Range node which handles where the texture map will be in correspondence to the 3D mesh's location.

The last part of this undertaking is further increasing the liquid effect's realism. This step involves using the Noise Texture and Bump nodes to simulate this randomly generated and uncontrolled effect, with a side dish task of setting your texture cutter radius with the last Math node in the preparations list.

At 1D Noise Texture setting, the Noise Texture-Bump combo generates the least amount of flat bump lines over the flat texture surface. If you want your ripples to be more visible on a, say, metallic surface, you can scale up the Bump strength.

Last of all lasts, additionally connect the Map Range node to the Math node, but not before setting the default Add mode to Greater Than node. Decreasing the Threshold increases the range of the cutter.

Note: While running on the Eevee render engine, transparent textures will appear black instead. Switching to Cycles will display the transparency as desired.

Up for some white chocolate in the evening?