Texture Projection with Blending

[ggery96]

Hi everyone,
I'm currently trying to make an animation where moss is growing along the floor/tree. The "starting point" should be flexible, so the best solution I found was projecting the texture.

So I built a base layer with dirt and a 2nd layer with moss, which gets the alpha value from the sphere projection.
This works perfectly fine when I render it with the standard maya render, but as soon as I use arnold, the projection nodes's blend attribute (which is essential) stops working. [<- comparison clip in the description]

I already tried Arnolds aiDistance in combination with a mixShader, but this leaves a hole inside the "projection mesh".

 

Combining the projection and aiDistance or combining with ramp nodes also didn't give me clean results.

Does anyone know how to fix this or another approach to reach that effect?

Thanks in advance!

Best regards

(Maya 2024.2, Arnold 5.4.1)

[ggery96]

Hello, I am still working on the problem and have tried various approaches, such as using ramp nodes, but I still don't have a result.

Any ideas, solutions or workarounds?