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Here is a simple flower bud with a colour pattern using noise and a gradient texture.

enter image description here

Now I want to add two textures, a wave pattern for the petals and a noise pattern for the stem. I have used a gradient into a colour ramp as a kind of mask. The texture settings are set high here just so it's easy to see. Each bump node I have run into the normal input on a diffuse shader (I think the problem is here). Because when I then mix it with the base colour pattern I'm getting the colour data from the diffuse nodes blending with the base colour pattern in the first image.

enter image description here

enter image description here

How can I add these two texture/bump nodes and fade between them in a way that doesn't interfere with the base colour pattern I want to use?

EDIT: This question was closed as a duplicate, but the linked question is a different issue. I was able to solve this problem by dragging the colour output from the colour ramp node for the pattern into the diffuse bsdf nodes for each texture. It feels like a messy set-up to me, I think this could be done more elegantly.

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Hi @JachymMichal thank you. That is close. But it doesn't solve the problem of fading one texture into the other. It uniformly applies them together... $\endgroup$
    – Aubrey
    Apr 28, 2021 at 12:05

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Your chosen route is to mix two shaders, each shader with its own normals, generated from heights, using Bump nodes.

Mixing Shaders is, as far as I know, gathering contributions from each shader, biasing samples made by the renderer, in Cycles. In EEVEE, I'm not sure. In particular, I don't know how normals are combined. Maybe someone who knows can help with that. Mixing normals is tricky: they represent directions; just mixing the colors that encode the directions won't do.

Why the ramble? Because, however that's done, mixing heights is easy by comparision. It's just an addition.

Personally, using the 'Node Wrangler' shipped-add-on's convenience, CtrlShift-clicking nodes to preview their output as I went along, I would ..

enter image description here

  • Preview the Wave and Noise textures, and try them out through Bump on their own, on a neutral material. I would put whatever was needed around them (perhaps Color Ramp / Multiply) to adjust the heights, before they get to the Bump node.
  • Preview the Gradient, on its own, to make sure it was oriented correctly, and roughly right.

So the resulting chunk of tree would be something like this:

enter image description here

What's in those 'Adjusted' groups will depend on how you want your waves and noise to look. The Multiply Add is just my choice for changing the width and location of the gradient.

The only suggestion is that it's easier to mix heights, here, than shaders, or normals.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you that's a helpful answer. It looks like I've stumbled into a rabbit hole here re: combining normals, the linked answer and subsequent links there, are informative and dense. The originally linked suggested duplicate answer was succinct solution to this and useful but didn't help me with mixing the gradient transition in. $\endgroup$
    – Aubrey
    Apr 29, 2021 at 11:39

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