| Greg Tatum.com |
Now you have most of the basic skills to create textures. For even more power you can blend various noises together. This allows for more complexity in a texture, and better results. You have 3 components to work with in the DTE, Component 1, Component 2, and Component 3. Each of these components can be loaded with some kind of noise you create, and then blended together using the various Blending Modes for a final texture.
Blending is fairly easy and straight forward, and you still have a lot of options that you can mess around with. In each component you can turn on the Color, Alpha, and Bump information. Depending on the blending modes you choose, the final texture will have some or all of these in it. The very center lower box that says "combination" is where the DTE shows you your final product.
To combine textures all you do is click on the Component Blending Mode (14 & 15) and then choose the option you want. There are 2 different ones, to determine how each component will blend with each other. If you pretend that each component were a layer, then Component 1 would be the lowers layer, with Component 2 on top of it, and Component 3 on the very top. This is fairly straight forward, but still requires a bit of experimentation to figure out what your doing.
| Parallel | This option takes the first available value information from the components in order 1, 2, and 3. What that means that is if you have Parallel selected on both of the Component Blending modes, and have alpha turned on in Component 1, color turned on in Component 2, and bump in Component 3 it would use each respectively in the final texture. However, if you had only alpha turned on in each component it would only use the first one. It just takes the value information from the first available component and ignores the rest. So that means that none of the values are blended. |
| Combine | It combines textures together, with a dominance of white and black values for the bottom texture. It is more like if you had a form defined by the bottom texture and then a texture added on top of that. |
| Average | The values are averaged. |
| Multiply | The values are multiplied |
| Maximum | The maximum value is taken. |
| Add | The values are added together |
| Sub | The values are subtracted |
| Blend v1 | The textures are blended with the bottom texture being dominant. |
| Blend v2 | The textures are blended with the top texture being dominant. |
| Blend Slope | The texture blending changes depending on slope with the top texture being the more steep slope. |
| Blend Altitude | The texture blending changes according to height, with the top texture being the higher texture. |
| Blend Orientation | The texture blending changes according to the orientation of the object. |
| Fast Slope | Same as blend slope, just more dramatic. (Those snow on top of mountain pictures use this trick.) |
| Blend Random | Random blending. |
| Blend Min | The minimum values are blended together. |
| Blend Max | The maximum values are blended together. |
| Proc Blend | Black values tend to dominate. Similar to multiply but the values of white are more strong. |
| Difference | This is a really cool blending method, although I'm not sure how it works. It makes for interesting combinations. |
| Greg Tatum.com |