Dev news : RA copper blocks done (Patreon)

I finalized the various oxidation stages of copper blocks (and cut copper), which look pretty close to what I had in mind.

I decided to use "metal" values for the copper oxidation (also called verdigris, from French "vert-de-gris", vert meaning green), even though oxides like rust or verdigris are not magnetic/metallic but dielectrics.

The reason for this is mostly because of LabPBR and shaders limitations. The transition between metals and non-metals can look jarring when used on "random" noisy patterns (it works fine with clearly delineated parts such as steel rails on rail blocks). Older versions of Optifine even performed non-point filtering on mipmapping on those masks, causing metallic and non-metallic adjacent parts to turn into either a "semi"-metallic (?) nonsense or worse, a hardcoded metal when the used shaderpack is HCM compliant.

Latest versions of Optifine can improve this by performing nearest/point filtering on mipmaps so metallic values wouldn't change abruptly on edges. It can still be tricky and jarring with patterns such as corrosion so that's why I used metals with very high roughness.

Here are some animated corrosion progressions using various shaders

Continuum 2.1, copper block

Kappa v4.1, copper block

MollyVX, cut copper (nighttime with sea lanterns)

Nostalgia v3.1, cut copper

Nostalgia v4.1, cut copper

SEUS PTGI HRR 2.1 with GFME 1.5, cut copper

Blocks and corrosion levels for each screenshot, with the shaderpack used

01 : weathered cut copper - NostalgiaVX P3a
02 : exposed cut copper - NostalgiaVX P3a
03 : weathered cut copper - MollyVX
04 : exposed cut copper - MollyVX
05 : exposed copper block - Continuum 2.1 alpha build 12
06 : copper block - Chronos
07 : weathered copper block - Chocapic v9.1 Extreme PBR test 2
08 : cut copper - BSL v8.1
09 : weathered cut copper - BSL v8.1
10 : weathered cut copper - SEUS PTGI HRR 2.1 with GFME 1.5