Shader and Cubemap

ShaderFX to me is different to some of the other shaders I'm more used to. The results are always strange which makes me wish I tried doing this in Unity and creating it using CG code which I have a little knowledge of.

I did try a mess with the idea of using to use the Substance plug-in for Maya and released it would most likely not work as well as I would want and might need a few more tweaks to get it working.

I began to learn a lot about how to get something looking better inside of ShaderFX, I created the shader as the last week results were not what I wanted.I also added an ambient light and directional light to the scene to help stop that darkening of the material when I rotate around the scene.
After re-creating the shader I had something that would now transition between dry and a snow state.

Material Dry State

Material Snow State

New Shader for the Material.

Now that I had the basic material change from dry to snow now it's time to do the water. I went around and created a reflection map (cube map) so that when the water comes into play you would see a reflection of an environment, just to help bring the realism and not just have it a color and look a little odd for this project. 

Reflection Cube Map

Cubemap

The cube map took me a while to figure out because it had to be in a dds file format and I had never done that before so I had to use a NVIDA plug in to create this. I also did try a AMD Cubemap gen tool as well but I wasn't getting the results I wanted from that. 

After I had worked out how to create this I then went onto creating the additional lerp to bring in the water as well.  

I also brought in an additional height map so that the transitions would look different from how each of the textures come into the brick. 

Updated shader with additional Lerp

Around this time I was beginning to worry as some other modules were becoming demanding but I also have been having so many issues with how the shader is looking for this material transition that I've gone over longer than I wanted to with creating this texture.

Though I added the new lerp it was creating some bad artifacts, for example now the texture had black spots. 

These would only ever go away when I brought in the water, however all that did was change the color of the snow and if I took the snow away the water wouldn't stay.

Black spots go when water lerp is set to more than or equal to 1.

When the snow lerp is set to 0 even the water goes.