Original subtitles

The moss is looking better and better, but it's still a bit flat.

It would be nice if it had a bit more volume, to make it pop from the wall a bit more.

We do have this mask of the moss, so we could try using it to displace the

moss out of the wall a bit. So let's try adding it onto the displacement.

It does make the moss pop out, but there is a big step all around the moss edges,

as we are using a sharp mask to displace the moss.

But over here, we have the moss surface distance, which we can use to generate a soft mask for the

displacement. Basically, we want to take the parts of the moss that are far away from the wall, and

displace them even farther, while the edge, where the moss approaches the wall should stay in place.

We could use a Map Range to get the mask we need, but in this case, it can actually be

accomplished with just a multiplication. The key is that we want to enable clamp,

so that our range is restricted to the zero to one range. That way,

all the negative values get clamped to zero, so that we don't affect anything outside the moss,

and all the values above one get clamped to one. So we can use the multiplication factor to set

the upper cutoff point of the mask, which is basically how far into the moss it goes.

Now if we add this onto the displacement,

instead of the sharp mask, there is a falloff which mitigates the sudden displacement.

There are still some places where there are some sharp edges, especially near the mortar grooves,

but there's no way around that with this technique, and we'll be reducing

the displacement intensity anyway, which will make the artifacts less noticeable.

Now, to create a nice rounded displacement, let's use the old power trick. Remember that the edge on

the dark side of the mask gets rounded, so here we actually want to invert the mask, so that we

are rounding the part inside the moss. So let's add two of our invert groups around the power.

And finally, let's add a multiplication onto the result, to reduce the intensity a bit.

Maybe .5 is a bit too low, so let's increase it a bit.

Then let's frame this, name it, and copy the node color. And it's time to organize everything again.

Toggling the effect, we can see the difference. It

just adds a little bit of volume, to make the moss stand out a bit more.