So, I've been following the blender guru's video tutorial for shading of dialectic materials. He uses something very much like this setup:
(He starts talking about it not long before 28:44.)
However, I see a few things here I don't understand, although it appears to offer the desired behavior. These questions pertain ONLY to the Bump, Geometry and the mix node they go into; you can basically ignore the rest of the setup.
1.) What is the bump node doing? He describes it as "reminding" blender that it is dealing with vectors, but that almost makes it sound like there is an "if" statement within blender to check input types, which seems hacky because it might be inconsistent among applications.
2.) What really happens when I mismatch inputs and outputs, (ie, the blue vector going into a green color node.)
And you can consider the whole question for this bit: why does the "Value" node only go into the roughness of the Glossy color? Why would it not be both?
Thanks a lot in advance!