So I’m trying to set up what is essentially color tinting of my base diffuse/albedo map driven by an RGB mask.
I’ve attempted to multiply Vector3 nodes on top of the diffuse, and then Lerp that multiply output with a mask (ex: R). I’ve repeated this process for each vector3 - multiply node, and then I’ve Lerped them together in an attempt to blend it all into final diffuse/albedo output. Here’s a screen cap:
This doesn’t seem to be the right way to go, because the final output is desaturated and too bright. I essentially just want to change the color of the RGB masked sections, and maintain the underlying diffuse (the sections I haven’t masked, like the skin tone, rubber, etc) and output it all into a final diffuse.
Where am I going wrong? Let me know if you need to see any further pics or need more info.
you are on the right path, just doing too many lerps. you wanna lerp between the base and the first multiply based on the first mask and lerp the result with the second multiply based on the second mask and so forth.
you’ll have to figure out the exact order of operation yourself, but the approach is valid.
Thank you Divi, I’ll try condensing it. Working with three masks seems to be where I’m struggling, as I don’t quite understand what the Lerp function is doing. I know it’s blending the two inputs…but I’m not sure how. Is it that I need to maintain the diffuse texture for each and every Lerp function? I’ve been reading the documentation and watching related videos, and while process is highlighted fairly well, walk throughs are scarce on theory.
In any case, thanks for your help Divi. I’ll post any results I come up with.
So I followed Divi’s advice and I got the color masking working, although the color blending could stand to be a bit more sophisticated. This seems to be the most streamlined way of handling diffuse masking, but perhaps there are some stronger methods? I’d be interested in learning more about masking and blending.
I prefer to use Blend_Overlay instead of Multiply. Tends to make things nicer in many cases. When doing colour tinting, keep in mind how the blending actually works. (Test things in Photoshop with blending modes). With Multiply, the closer to pure white your base colour is, the more or your overlaid colour you get. With Overlay it’s the same but with 50% grey. If you’re committing to using colour tinting on everything, don’t even bother using colours in your original color map. Just makes things weird.
To solve that problem I’m using the red channel from the diffuse to multiply other colors on top of, so that I can also maintain the existing diffuse skin that I don’t want to procedurally change, as well as have the original colors in the diffuse as a main color scheme. It’s been a bit of a tacked on solution, so I agree if all colors were to be completely procedural, It’d be best to design that from the start. I’ll keep looking into better workflows for it however. Thanks Void.
