Confusion with the pixel processor

[kashif.c.riley]

Hey guys... after watching the recent Twitch stream about creating old wood planks (it was awesome btw)... I tried to modify my own substance of wood planks and got really confused on making this happen using the pixel processor... so I am hoping to get some light on this node. Here is what I want to do:

This is the substance I made, which is supposed to be pressure treated wood...



In the shot above, I turned off the parameter that allows me to create planks on the texture for stuff like hardwood floors and decking. And it also allows me to create age on the wood as well and make it wet.




Now here is the same substance with the planks enabled. I like it, but all it did was just overlay the planks over the existing wood layer without really doing anything such as randomising the wood grain. And there is the relatively simple graph that controls all of this. Now what i want to do, is randomise the wood grain details, for the albedo, roughness, normal, and AO, BUT ONLY WHEN THE PLANKS ARE ENABLED. And I have no idea how to go about this. The processor is a way for me to further vary the wood planks... any help at all would be great...

[Cory McG]

I actually wouldn't use pixel processor for this. I'm not sure how your plank outlines were created, but if it uses a tile generator of some sort, I'd use that with random luminance values to feed a distortion node, or nodes, one for each channel, if needed (again, depends how your graph is set up) and then use switches to control whether you use the new distorted output, or the regular output.

The trick here would be to have the switches (Blend node, switch mode) be controlled by a custom function, and use an if with your plank variable as the condition, returning 1 if true and 0 if false. Then when the planks are turned on, each channel will get parts moved appropriately when the switches read the plank bool.

That wood texture looks really good, by the way.

[kashif.c.riley]

Thanks, man. This texture took a lot of tweaking and playing around to get this look. I'm actually using nothing but blend nodes, and a few of them have the planks parameter on it which is just a boolean that turns it off an on.

As for the luminance variations, I have a parameter for that too, which makes the wood look really good. I'll give the switch node a shot to control the planks and figure out how to shuffle the wood texture based on those planks.

[kashif.c.riley]

Update: So I figured out a way to get the switch node to work on my wood planks... but now I am trying to figure out how to take the underlaying grain, and have it shuffled between the planks (and it also have to account for the number of planks) without using the pixel processor which works but not as predictably... maybe using a directional warp would help?

[kashif.c.riley]

After some fiddling with the pixel processor and altering my substance a bit, I got the wood planks looking very random and natural as well... and I also made it so that this randomisation only occurs when the planks are enabled... it was easier than I thought. And I think I am going to add some knots and ensure the same behaviour occurs with that pixel processor as well...