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I'm trying to achieve this result where the house is white, and the bricks show through the plaster in some places:

enter image description here

I have an image texture as a normal map, and I want to use a noise texture to "flatten out" the bumpiness of it, where the noise is white, and make it stick out where it's black.

I tried using a Bright/Contrast node, but it only gives a very slight effect. I want to be able to make it completely flat in some spots.

Here's my node setup:

enter image description here

Here's my current result:

enter image description here

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2 Answers 2

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You could use the following material set up to achieve the desired effect :

brick material with plaster

This is using a Bump node instead of the Displacement socket as it is more easily configurable. Using Displacement (True Displacement) can result in gaps in your surface - especially if there are hard edges in the texture (such as where the surface transitions between brick and plaster). The Color Ramp allows the noise texture to be modified to produce the desired patches and this passes on to a Maximum node so that the flat plaster gives way to brick as the noise texture drops low. This will mean that the White areas will be the plaster rather than the Black in your example.

The Bump node is used to apply the texture to the surface Normal and this gives the impression of displacement rather than actually displacing the surface.

The Invert node is there simply to invert the brick texture I am using as my particular texture has light mortar and dark bricks. I am using the raw colour data to determine the depth and this is not ideal (it's under the assumption that lighter colours (the mortal) are set back more than the bricks). The inversion ensures that the mortar is inset rather than protruding.

You can adjust the plaster by varying the Color Ramp - this can adjust the amount of plaster/holes as well as changing the hardness of the edges by making the transition between Black and While sharper or softer. The thickness of the plaster can be varied by reducing the brightness of the White.

The Bump node can be amended to change the height/strength of the bump effect and this will affect the thickness of the plaster as well as the strength of the brick texture. The Normal from the Bump node feeds into the shader Normal.

Here's the brick texture I used. It isn't ideal as it has dark shadows which affect the bump mapping :

brick texture

Tweaking the Noise distortion and adding colour based on the presence of plaster can produce the following result :

render

Or adjust it for a more subtle effect :

subtle brick patches

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I found a solution, the Noise texture wasn't completely black, so that's why the effect was so bad. I change Bright/Contrast to a ColorRamp, to enhance the black spots, and now I got this nice result. Any other variations are welcome. I'd also like to get some thickness to the plaster for closeups.

enter image description here

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Try using Maximum instead of Multiply. That way the white parts of the noise should raise the surface rather than the dark bits flatten it. $\endgroup$
    – Rich Sedman
    Commented Jan 3, 2017 at 17:22
  • $\begingroup$ If I just change to maximum, I see the bricks on all places, except where the noise is white, where I get an effect that the wall is sunken in. I tried switching black and white in the color ramp, but it didn't work well. Is there a step I missed? $\endgroup$
    – Niclas
    Commented Jan 3, 2017 at 17:39
  • $\begingroup$ I've added an answer. Hope this helps. $\endgroup$
    – Rich Sedman
    Commented Jan 3, 2017 at 19:25

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