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Please excuse me if I get terminology wrong here; I'm still learning. I have a mesh that is a humanoid figure with metallic clothing. When I channel-unpacked one of the included textures, I found this:

enter image description here

In this image, the white areas correspond perfectly with the metallic areas, and the black areas correspond perfectly with the non-metallic areas. Up to this point, my process has been like this: I rename the material Human_body, for instance, and then I create a second material called Human_body_metal. I then go into Edit mode and select all the polygons that would correspond to the metallic areas, and then assign it to the Human_body_metal material. I would then edit that material, adding the original image textures to it but changing the Metallic, Specular, and Roughness settings to get the reflective value I want. This has two significant disadvantages: first, it's difficult and time-consuming and second, there isn't always a clear polygonal delineation between metallic and non-metallic zones.

Having discovered this black & white image map, however, it seems likely that I am supposed to use this as a kind of mask, a way to differentiate between the two zones (metallic and non-metallic) for the mesh. How can I do this?

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  • $\begingroup$ You need to plug it into the factor of a Mix Shader that mixes 2 shaders (one metallic and one non-metallic) or into the Metallic input of the Principled BSDF, depending on what are supposed to be these 2 shaders $\endgroup$
    – moonboots
    Sep 1 at 17:05
  • $\begingroup$ Wow, that worked great! I was experimenting with this, and I was using a MixRGB node instead of a MixShader node, which wasn't working. Your suggestion put me on the right track. Thanks so much! $\endgroup$ Sep 1 at 17:16

1 Answer 1

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You need to plug it into the factor of a Mix Shader that mixes 2 shaders (one metallic and one non-metallic) or into the Metallic input of the Principled BSDF, depending on what are supposed to be these 2 shaders (solution 1 if your shaders are completely different, solution 2 if the metallic part is just a variation of the basic material).

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