Original subtitles

This all looks a bit too uniform, so let's randomize the colors.

For now, let's just add variation between individual bricks. This is the type of variation

you would see when the individual bricks had different colors prior to the construction of

the wall, as opposed to variation caused by weathering of the already built wall.

For this type of variation, we'll again make use of the Random output of the Bricks group. It's

important to take note that we are already using the X channel here, to randomize the rotation.

Let's add a Reroute here, to neatly carry this link over to another Separate XYZ node.

Keeping all the links aligned, we can take this all the way to where

we are setting the color at the end of the tree.

Let's add a Hue Saturation node, and copy the brick color over from the mix node.

This node allows us to take an input color, and manipulate it.

We could change the parameters, and plug our random value into the factor,

which blends between the input color, and the modified color,

but that's not very interesting, as we would just be blending between two colors.

Instead, we can leave the factor on one, and directly randomize the parameters with random

values. Let's skip the X component, as we already used it for the rotation, and using it again,

would link the color and rotation, meaning that all the bricks that are rotated clockwise would

have a certain color, and all the bricks that are rotated counter clockwise would have another.

So let's plug the Y channel into the Hue. Immediately we see that this is much more

interesting than randomizing the factor, as we can have a wide range of colors with just one input.

But perhaps we don't actually want that many colors. So let's add a Map Range node,

to control the range of hues that we want to use.

Keeping in mind that 0.5 leaves the Hue unchanged, let's use some values close to 0.5.

To increase the contrast between colors, let's compress the range a bit. Raising the From Min

value, will clamp all the values below it to the To Min output value. And similarly lowering the

From Max will clamp all the values above it to the To Max output value. Note that this

only happens if Clamp is enabled, otherwise it would extrapolate the values outside the range.

If we bias the From Min and Max to one side of the range, we can have more bricks of one color

than the other. So if we want more red bricks than yellow ones, we can increase the Min a bit,

and keep the Max closer to one, as red is in the lower side of the range.

Now we can duplicate this Map Range, and connect it to another Random channel to randomize the

brightness of the color. Let's reset the From range, and connect it to the Value input.

This time a value of one will leave the color unchanged, so let's roughly center our values

around that, so that our average brightness doesn't change much. And then we can refine

our ranges until we like how it looks. Another thing that we can do to change the distribution,

and increase the contrast, without clamping the range further, is changing the interpolation

to smooth step. This will bias the values to the lower and upper parts of the range.

One more thing that can be cool, is to make the red bricks darker than the yellow bricks,

so let's duplicate the range that we used for the Hue, and this time leave it connected to

the same Random channel, so that we can use it to influence the Value as well. We can do this

by multiplying the value. If we set both outputs to one, our multiplication doesn't change anything

as it is multiplying by one everywhere. But then we can lower the first output, which maps to the

more red bricks, and raise the second output that maps to the more yellow bricks, and then,

the more red a brick is, the darker it will tend to be. But the brightness is still random as well,

as we are multiplying it with a completely independent random brightness value.

Finally, we can select these nodes, and as usual, wrap them in a Frame,

with Ctrl+J, and with F2 let's name it Brick Color this time. Then we can snap

everything into place, to make sure that our tree is always tidy and easy to read.