Dear All,
my first work is chemistry and I love CG. I’ve started to cooperate with friends that work in the institute for applied mathematics in my area and we thinking to start to simulate shaders that mimic corrosion.
The path for now is this
- we have a scanned object
- we evaluate morphological characteristic of the obj (i.e. where we have the lower surface, saddle point etc)
- we give different colors due to different characteristics.
Since now nothing new. You can use zbrush, cavity maps and appropriate shader.
What we are giving a try is also
4) choose to “mask” some part of the mesh
5) calculate a direction where corrosion “flow” (if you look at a stutue you can see how the corrosion products are mainly in one direction)
Is anyone interested in the topic and cooperation ? the idea is to create a plugin for some software to age models 
(this should be cool) any hints ? suggestion ? what’s the best way for implementing a shader plugin for zbrush
thanks in advance for the reply