6
$\begingroup$

First of all, I'm quite new to Blender and 3D graphics in general, so this problem might be trivial, but I can't seem to figure out what is going wrong here.

I decided to put a bump node on a metallic texture to simulate scratches. At first, I was getting "bumps", and also they were way too defined, so I ran the image through a math node set to -0.0005 which solved the problem and I was quite happy with the result (as you can see on the right side of the image).

But then I noticed that the texture was "inverted" on one side of the cylinder, thus showing "bumps" again, so now there are ridges on one side of the cylinder, but bumps on the other. Obviously, though, I want there to only be ridges on the whole object.

At first, I thought it might be caused by the negative value on the math node, but when I put in a positive value, the problem is identical but inverted (ridges are replaced with bumps and vice versa).

So my question is - why? What is causing this and how can I fix it?

The scene is lit with a single point light. Below I've included images of several views of the problem as well as the node setup I am using for the metallic texture.

Text

Node setup:

Text

Thanks for any help.

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
0

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
4
$\begingroup$

Your 'Bump' node is not being used correctly.

The 'Bump'takes a 'Height' and generates a Normal - to be fed into the Normal of a shader node. However, you're using the Normal to pass into Displacement of the Material Output.

The Displacement socket of the Material Output used to only be a Scalar value (a grey socket) but has since been enhanced to be a Vector. This does mean that it's now the same colour as the Normal and can cause confusion.

Instead of Bump, use a Displacement node. You should connect the output of your Multiply node into the Height of the Displacement and the output from the Displacement node can then be passed into the Material Output 'Displacement' socket. This will result in a diplacement in the direction of the normal of the surface at each point.

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
1
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Thank you! I wasn't sure of the difference between the bump and displacement nodes, now it's all clear. $\endgroup$
    – Llaminator
    Commented Feb 1, 2021 at 14:11

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .