the falloff map has been there for a while and it is still underestimated regarding how useful it can be. let me shed some light on specific use cases where falloff maps make perfectly sense.
case 1: ‘slight backlight for character skins without hair’
quite often you experience that you miss some slight tiny light effect on a character’s skin when some backlighting is available. if your subject has a lot of hair, then backlighting is very effective. but for characters without hair, no effect can be seen. so one final thing that can help is to use a falloff map in the self-illumination channel of your subject, which can create a slight glow on the faces whose normals point outwards from the camera view (falloff type: perpendicular/ parallel), the outer edge of a surface.
case 2: ‘x-ray my object’
using a falloff map in the opacity channel will bring up the interesting result that the object looks like it is seen through an x-ray screen.
case 3: ‘snowy object without additional meshes’
if you’re working for example on a rocky canyon for a scene which should be slightly covered by some tiny bits of snow – don’t do that by hand or particles: just create a falloff map, falloff type towards/ away, falloff direction local z-axis (or whatever axis is the indicates the height of the scene) and add a simple noise on the first map slot. also don’t forget to turn on ‘alpha from rgb intensity’ in the output section, so you can see the original rock below the snow.
go and grab the 3dsmax-file where i saved the three cases as materials.
any more cool uses of the falloff map? let me know, i’m wondering what creative uses other users discovered with the falloff map.