Original subtitles

The moss is looking good, but there is one final touch to really sell this.

Right now the moss is composed of pretty solid chunks, but it would be nice to also have

some fine moss sprouts sprinkled over the wall, to blend the boundaries of the moss

chunks.

Here in the moss texture, we defined the shapes of the moss clusters, using low and medium

frequency textures.

So let's continue in the same way, and add a high frequency texture.

Let's duplicate this Noise, and copy the high frequency color.

Then let's make it much smaller, and take a look.

Let's also drop the detail, so that we basically get little dots.

Then let's add a subtraction to center the noise around zero, like with the other noises.

Now let's try adding this onto the displacement texture, as usual, and see what happens.

We can see that it added a fine texture throughout the moss, and it made the edges of the moss

more fuzzy, with these little dots.

If we want more of this sparse spotty moss throughout the wall, we can just increase

the intensity, and it will poke through the wall in more places.

So let's multiply this value.

Now, the more we increase the value, the more we see this spotty texture, which creates

a nice effect for a slightly different type of moss.

Let's also check this out in Cycles, remembering to enable the displacement.

Immediately it looks very weird, and everything seems to become a big shadow.

If we take a closer look, especially if we look from the side, we see that we have huge

spikes sticking out of the wall.

This isn't really what we want, but it makes sense, since we are multiplying this noise

by such a large value.

This makes the texture poke through the wall in more places, which looks good in our moss

mask, but it's a total failure for our displacement, as it is going way too far.

As we saw before, just reducing the multiplication isn't a solution, as we lose most of the nice

spotty effect.

So let's try to come up with a solution that let's us use the intense texture for the mask,

but the more subtle texture for the displacement.

Let's first deal with the mask.

Here we are feeding the moss displacement texture into two components, the mask being

computed by the Less Than, and the general displacement texture being computed just above.

So the fist thing we can do, is add this new noise only to the mask component, and not

the displacement component.

So let's bring the addition over here, and connect it just before the Less Than, without

also feeding this value to the other nodes above.

Then we can plug the texture back in.

Now, if we look at the mask, we see the spotty texture.

But if we look at the displacement texture, it doesn't have any sign of this texture at

all.

So let's check the result in Cycles.

Indeed we got rid of the big spikes, but the spotty texture doesn't seem to be very visible.

Let's take a closer look.

Here we see that the spots are there, but because they are not being displaced, we only

see them as a difference in the shading, which is much less noticeable, and looks very strange

being completely flat on the bricks.

So let's see how we can implement the displacement as well, without getting the big spikes again.

Firstly, we'll need a less intense version of the texture.

So let's duplicate the multiplication and set it to a lower value.

Like we saw before, if we would add this to the moss displacement now, this texture wouldn't

be strong enough to poke through the wall surface.

What we can do instead, is add this to the whole displacement texture, after we combine

the moss with the wall.

So let's add a Math node all the way at the end of the displacement texture, and connect

our new Noise.

If we look at the render now, we see the texture applied to the whole surface, as it's being

added to everything, rather than being combined with the Maximum operation.

Of course, this isn't the result we're going for, however, it doesn't have those spikes,

as the texture is much less intense, and it looks much closer to what we'd want.

Now, all we need is a way to limit this displacement, only to the places where there is moss.

It just so happens that we already have a mask to do exactly that!

Our moss mask has the same spotty texture that matches exactly with the displacement

texture, so we can use it to mask this displacement.

So let's just add a multiplication to the displacement texture, and plug in the mask.

If we take a look at the result, we now have the same displacement texture, but only in

the spots with moss.

So now if we look at the final shader, we finally have the result that we are looking

for.

The spotty texture is diffusing our moss, like we wanted, but without creating big spikes

in the displacement.

And the best part is that now we can control the texture intensity for the mask and for

the displacement completely independently.

So if we consider that this displacement is still too intense, we can just lower this

multiplication, and it doesn't affect the texture distribution at all, only the displacement

amount.

Now that this is working, we have a new type of moss, with more diffuse blended boundaries,

but it would be nice to also have some of that more chunky moss we had before, in some

spots.

So let's modulate the moss spottiness with a noise.

We already happen to have a low frequency Noise here that is perfect for this situation.

We are using the first channel for the general moss distribution, and the last channel for

the color, but luckily, we still have one independent channel free to use for this.

So let's make some space here for a Map Range node.

And then we can connect the second noise channel to it.

Let's use it to modulate the amount of spottiness in the mask.

We had a value of five there, which was working nicely, so let's use that for the max output,

and let's try something like two for the min.

But it's best to take a look a the mask itself, to see how these values affect it.

There doesn't seem to be that much variation right now, so let's compress the input range

to get some more noticeable differences in the distribution.

A min of zero let's us really see the texture distribution.

We can also invert the order of the outputs, to invert which parts get spots and which

don't.

I think something like this looks pretty good, as we get some nice chunky bits over here.

Now let's set the lowest output back up to two, so that we don't completely turn off

the effect.

This is only modulating the distribution, but not the displacement intensity, as that

is controlled by the other multiplication.

So let's duplicate this Map Range, and then we can also modulate the intensity, so that

parts with less of the spotty texture also get less of this displacement.

We had a value of .5, so let's set something around that range.

And let's perhaps change the input distribution a bit as well.

But as usual this is all subjective.

Since we are clipping the noise, let's set the interpolation to Smooth Step.

And finally let's take a look at the result.

Now we can see that we have some parts with this diffused spotty moss, and some parts

with a more chunky and defined moss.

Now, all that remains is to organize this last bit of the node tree.

Finally, we can sit back, and admire the final result that we created after all this work,

while we start thinking about all the new things we can make next with the techniques

that we explored.