Texturing Trick: How Mix Maps Make Your Life Easier
The Aim
Today we’re going to learn how to use the ‘Mix’ map within our textures in order to make our scenes more realistic / easier to edit.
About a year or so ago I was reading through tutorials online and I stumbled on this basic concept in texturing that changed my approach drastically. When you’ve been texturing before you might have worked hard within Photoshop, or by adding other maps like bumps or alphas maybe. You might have fiddled with the numbers next to them to increase or decrease their intensity and come up with some decently cool effects.
Or perhaps you’re the person that took more than one image into Photoshop and used layers to blend them together, returning there every time you wanted to tweak it.
There’s nothing wrong with these approaches, and they definitely have their place, but I wanted to share something with you that makes life a whole lot easier overall. It won’t replace those other techniques entirely, but it will enhance them.
The Trick
Open up the Material Editor in either a scene you’ve created or a simple scene with a sphere. Assign the first material to your sphere (or scene) and click on the button you’d usually add bitmaps into you can select ‘Mix’.
This should show you the following set of options; you can see that there are places for two other maps. You can put anything you want into these – two bitmaps, a bitmap and another kind of map, or even only a bitmap and a colour.
For this quick tutorial I’m going to use a bitmap of some bright wood. I’m also going to select black for my second colour.
Great – but it hasn’t changed the bitmap at all. This is because we’ve left the dial for Mix Amount at ‘0’, so currently our Mix map isn’t doing anything. Lets raise that to 40, that should darken the whole texture:
That’s fine if you want to mix the textures evenly, however if you only wanted to apply it in parts of the texture we can click on the map point next to Mix Amount. For now I’m going to add a simple smoke texture (though you can add whatever sort of map you desire) to act as a Mask.
This means that the second map/colour only gets applied to the parts defined by the Mask. You can create some complex effects using these techniques, and you don’t have to limit yourself to only mixing the diffuse either; you can mix any of the map channels, or even layer your mix maps. Here’s our rendered image:
Wrap Up
I hope this has been of use to you, if you’ve any questions/comments/something to add feel free to comment or email me and I’ll be happy to respond! Also if you try out this technique, let me know what you thought.
The3dStudio.com