Mixing in Brick Details Will Affect the mortar also?

[proc24]

Hey there,

I have 2 small questions for the lecture Procedural Brick - Brick Grain. In the lecture we added in noise for the brick surface details in form of chips and grain on the bricks. To bring them in we added a math > add node for the grain and a math > subtract node for the brick chips with our brick wall map as input.

The result looks like this:

I would have expected we would be working with a mask (either the brick or mortar mask) to bring in the brick details, because as I understand it the brick grain and chips noise would otherwise also affect the mortar parts, right? I mean maybe this is what we want and it doesnt necessarily look bad because of that. I was just wondering because when I increase and decrease the grain amount of my bricks with the controls we added in the lecture, I also bring forth and back the mortar a little bit.

Secondly, to randomize the grain noise applied to each brick we used a whitenoise texture, then separated its colors and selected the green channel.

This is what we have:

As far as I understand it each channel of the value output of a whitenoise should be the same since its a black and white value. I think we should have used the color output instead, but maybe my conception of the values are wrong so I wanted to ask about that as well.

EDIT: As for the second question I was right, we really should have connected the color pin of the white noise. Stephen clears that up at the very first seconds of the next lecture

Thanks for your help!

[zeRgenTa]

The reason that the mortar isn’t being masked off, is because it gets masked off after all the detail is added to the bricks with a math node set to maximal. That way, it only has to be masked off once.

[proc24]

You are right @zeRgenTa, I followed along the mortar paths and indeed, because we put on such a great mortar depth in our mortar depth frame, the values for the mortar in the upper maximum input start at -8.5, whereas the mortar details we bring in with the second input of the math > maximum node have a minimum of -0.6, thus they mask off all the brick chips, grain or whatever detail applied to the mortar before. Thank you so much!

One question that I had while recapping what we did is about the multiply node in the mortar depth here:

Doesnt this also mean the node depth there is kind of useless or am I missing its point? As far as I understand we mask off all the mortar things except the width of the mortar, thus we also mask off the mortar depth we apply in the mortar depth node. I mean the only exception would be if we put in negative multiply values to produce greater mortar depth values than we created in the Mortar frame, which then would mask off the mortar frame input in the math > maximum node instead.

Thanks again for your help!