Layered Texture question

#1

I’m looking for tutorials on layered textures in Blender but I’m not finding much. Is it called something else? I have seen a couple tutorials on Procedural textures but I’m not seeing anything for layered textures.

#2

When you talk about layered textures i assume you are coming from Maya.

Blender doesn’t have them and it does have them.
At the moment the whole texture pipeline is still a bit messy,
which will hopefully get cleaned up with the recode of the shading pipeline.

When you have a new material you kind of have layered textures as defaults.
The texture stack acts like layers (like PS) from top to bottom with the top “layers” going in first,
so your most bottom texture is on top (in PS terms).

Then you have the texture nodes which opens a whole other layer of complexity because there you assign node outputs which you assign as layers in the texture stack.

And on top of that again you have material nodes which duplicates other layering functionality
(you can use textures there too).

best go reading in the wiki manual to get a better idea.

#3

Thanks, I did find this on the Yafray site where they talk about using the Blender Comopositor. http://www.yafaray.org/documentation/tutorials/compositing

I appreciate you shedding light on this, it doesn’t look too hard to do layered textures but it isn’t the most intuitive of pipelines.

And yes, I am coming from Maya. I’ve been using Silo for a while now too but its lack of integrated renderer has me looking for other options so I’ve been investigating Blender.

#4

Blender has applied the notion of “nodes” to both textures and materials, as well as compositing. This, rather than “layers,” would probably be the best place to begin.

As you can see, “top-to-bottom layers” for a long time were all that we had. Then, nodes came along like thunder. While vestiges of “the old Republic” still remain, e.g. for backward compatibility with existing files, nodes are the way to go now.

#5

+1 to Sundial. The whole layers/stack is kinda old skool. Nodes are cool. See http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Textures/Types/Nodes

#6

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