How to BLEND TEXTURES in Blender with NODES

Introduction — What are we going to do?

In this arti­cle we are going to see how to com­bine two tex­tures in Blender to apply them to the same mate­r­i­al using nodes, this is going to be a some­what exten­sive arti­cle but with quite inter­est­ing con­tent, we will see step by step how to go from a stan­dard plane as in the image on the left to the result of the image on the right, in which two tex­tures have been com­bined, a rock brick floor with a mud tex­ture that is applied most­ly in the spaces between the rocks, all this in a pro­ce­dur­al way.


3d model of a plane on which a material with combined textures will be applied in blender
two combined textures based on a noise pattern in Blender.

Download .Blend file with implemented nodes

Textures from this example

If you want to fol­low the pro­ce­dure step by step here are the images I used. Right click and save the images.

Initial configuration of the model and material

We start with the stan­dard plane in fig­ure 1 and cre­ate a mate­r­i­al for it.

3d model of a plane on which a material with combined textures will be applied in blender
Fig. 1: To com­bine tex­tures in Blender let's start with a plane.
material creation window for 3D model in blender
Fig. 2: We cre­ate a mate­r­i­al for the 3D model.

Configuration of the textures to be combined

With the object and the mate­r­i­al select­ed we open the Shad­er Edi­tor win­dow to visu­al­ize the mate­r­i­al nodes, we can see it in fig­ure 3, by default a mate­r­i­al in blender is cre­at­ed with the Shad­er Prin­ci­pled BSDF, to have a very basic idea, a Shad­er is like a code frag­ment that will be exe­cut­ed in the graph­ic card and that will deter­mine how the 3D object will be seen on screen, it is not nec­es­sary to go deep­er into the sub­ject, Blender offers us the Shad­er Edi­tor to cre­ate com­plex Shaders in a visu­al and intu­itive way.

shader editor window to edit the shader of a material in blender
Fig. 3: We open a "Shad­er Edi­tor" win­dow to work on the tex­ture mix.

What we are going to do now is to load the two tex­tures that we want to com­bine, for that in the Shad­er Edi­tor win­dow we press SHIFT+A to add a new node and click­ing on "Search" we look for the "Image Tex­ture" node and posi­tion it to the left of the Prin­ci­pled BSDF node, the Image Tex­ture node should look like in fig­ure 5.

Window to add a node to the Shader.
Fig. 4: Win­dow for adding a node to the Shader.
image node for a material in blender
Fig. 5: An image node is added to the material.

As we are going to com­bine two tex­tures we will need two image nodes so we repeat the pre­vi­ous step and place the sec­ond image next to the first one.

Two image nodes to combine textures in Blender
Fig. 6: Two image nodes for com­bin­ing tex­tures in Blender

Now we load both tex­tures, for that we click on Open and in the pop­up win­dow we look for the tex­tures we need.

texture loading on image nodes to combine textures in blender
Fig. 7: Tex­tures are loaded in both nodes
Two image nodes to combine textures in Blender
Fig. 8: Both nodes have their respec­tive textures.

Blend Node Configuration — MixRGB

The next step is to add the node that will be in charge of mix­ing the tex­tures, press SHIFT+A and click on Search to look for the "MixRGB" node, which is shown in Fig­ure 10, place it in the mid­dle of the images and the Prin­ci­pled BSDF node.

window to search and add nodes in blender
Fig. 9: The win­dow to search for a node and add it is displayed.
rgb mix node to mix two textures in blender
Fig. 10: Search for the "MixRGB" node that will be used to com­bine the two textures.

The MixRGB node com­bines two col­ors, as in this case we have tex­tures, what it will do is to com­bine the col­ors of each tex­ture pix­el by pix­el accord­ing to a mix­ing fac­tor, this fac­tor can be a con­stant or it can also be a black and white tex­ture in which black rep­re­sents 0 and white rep­re­sents 1, being the grayscale all inter­me­di­ate val­ues. In fig­ure 11 we see how to con­nect the tex­tures that we want to com­bine to the mix node and in this we see the val­ue "Fac" in 0.5, that is the mix fac­tor, by default the tex­tures will be mixed in a fac­tor 50–50.

As shown in Fig­ure 12 we con­nect the out­put of the MixRGB node to the col­or input of the Shad­er Prin­ci­pled BSDF.

connection of two image nodes to a rgb mix node to combine textures in Blender
Fig. 11: Both images are con­nect­ed to the blend­ing node.
connection of the mix node output to the color input of the bsdf principled node in blender
Fig. 12: The out­put of the mix node is con­nect­ed to the input of the base col­or of the Shad­er Prin­ci­pled BSDF.

First result of the mix of textures

To visu­al­ize the result we go to the View­port and with the Z key we switch to "Mate­r­i­al Pre­view" or "Ren­dered" mode, although for the lat­ter we must take into account the light­ing. As can be seen in Fig­ure 13, the result is a 50–50 mix between both tex­tures in all points equally.

3d model visualization modes in blender
Fig. 13: Switch to the "Mate­r­i­al Pre­view" view to dis­play the applied material.

If we take the fac­tor to 0 the result is that the tex­ture con­nect­ed to Color1 is com­plete­ly applied, as shown in Fig­ure 15.

rgb mix node to mix two textures in blender
Fig. 14: The fac­tor deter­mines how the tex­tures are com­bined, we set the fac­tor to 0.
mud texture applied to a plane in blender
Fig. 17: With the fac­tor at 0 the mix­ture results in the first image.

If we take the fac­tor to 1 the result is that the tex­ture con­nect­ed to Color2 is ful­ly applied, as shown in Fig­ure 17.

rgb mix node to mix two textures in blender
Fig. 16: We set the fac­tor to 1.
brick texture applied to a plane in blender
Fig. 17: With the fac­tor at 1 the mix­ture results in the sec­ond image.

Mixing textures using noise

Now what we are going to do is that the tex­ture mix is not homo­ge­neous through­out the space, we want that in some parts the brick tex­ture is more vis­i­ble and in oth­ers the mud tex­ture, an alter­na­tive could be to use a noise node, which gen­er­ates a ran­dom grayscale tex­ture to which you can con­trol cer­tain para­me­ters and gen­er­ate dif­fer­ent patterns.

In the Shad­er Edi­tor win­dow press SHIFT+A and click on Search to find the "Noise Tex­ture" node.

window to search and add nodes in blender
Fig. 18: Search­ing for anoth­er node to add.
noise node added in Blender
Fig. 19: We add the "Noise Tex­ture" node.

We place the node in a com­fort­able place that allows us to con­nect it to the mix­ing node, we make the con­nec­tion as shown in fig­ure 20.

connecting the output factor of a noise node to the input factor of an rgb mix node in blender
Fig. 20: The out­put fac­tor of the noise node is con­nect­ed to the input fac­tor of the RGB­Mix node.

In the mate­r­i­al view you will notice the first results, how­ev­er I am going to add an inter­me­di­ate bright­ness and con­trast node so that the grays of the noise tex­ture are shift­ed to white or black.

window to search and add nodes in blender
Fig. 21: Search­ing for anoth­er node to add.
brightness and contrast node added in blender
Fig. 22: We add a bright­ness and con­trast node.

The bright­ness and con­trast node is placed between the noise tex­ture and the MixRGB node (Fig­ure 25 shows how it is con­nect­ed). In this case I am going to increase the con­trast a lot so that there are almost no grays, in fig­ure 23 we see that it has the val­ue 50.

brightness and contrast node in Blender.
Fig. 23: The bright­ness node is placed between the noise and the RGB Mix node and the con­trast is set to 50.

The result is that the mod­el has some parts where the brick tex­ture is applied and oth­ers where the mud tex­ture is applied, as shown in Fig­ure 24, you can play a lit­tle with the tex­ture node para­me­ters shown in Fig­ure 20 to see how the tex­ture mix behaves. You can also com­bine dif­fer­ent noise tex­tures with dif­fer­ent scales to cre­ate large areas of a tex­ture that has micro details. How­ev­er we will leave it here and con­tin­ue with the final step.

two combined textures based on a noise pattern in Blender.
Fig. 24: Both tex­tures are com­bined accord­ing to the noise texture.

Mixing textures using another texture as a factor

What we want to do now is to use the rock brick tex­ture itself to deter­mine how to blend the tex­tures, note that con­ve­nient­ly it is a grayscale tex­ture in which the whiter areas are rock while the dark­er areas are the cracks, we are going to use this infor­ma­tion to make the mud tex­ture blend into the cracks of the brick texture.

For con­ve­nience we can select the brick tex­ture node, dupli­cate it with CTRL+D and posi­tion it where the Noise Tex­ture node was. As we are not going to use this image as if it were the col­or of a mate­r­i­al but as a fac­tor we must change the "Col­or Space" para­me­ter to "Non-Col­or" as shown in Fig­ure 25.

image node for a material in blender
Fig. 25: Now the noise node is changed to an image node with the brick tex­ture and the Col­or Space is marked as "Non-Col­or".

By adjust­ing the val­ues we can get a result like the one in Fig­ure 26, in which the mud tex­ture has been com­bined with the rock tex­ture in such a way that it appears most­ly in the cracks of the rocks.

dos texturas combinadas basadas en un patrón de ruido en Blender.
Fig. 26: The mud tex­ture is com­bined with the brick tex­ture where the brick cracks would be.

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