Let's talk about procedural textures.
You've probably heard the term procedural before as well as the term generated
in the context of C. G.
These terms are practically synonymous. You can often use them interchangeably.
However the full term is actually
procedurally generated textures.
Procedurally generated is basically where you create a
texture using a mathematical formula instead of pixels.
Practically these generated textures can scale infinitely without loss
of resolution and often have a ton of settings.
You can tweet to get the look you want.
It's also much more efficient when it comes to data and file size.
There are several kinds of procedural textures to choose from.
Let's go ahead and take a look at them by going to our shader.
Editors add menu and looking through the textures category
excluding the image environment and I. S. Textures.
Every other texture you see here is a procedurally generated texture.
Each of these procedurally generated textures produces a particular pattern
such as wave gradients or noise.
Feel free to try any of these out.
But for this introduction I'm going to use of or annoy
this is a fracture like texture that we can go ahead
and connect to our base colour input of our shader.
As you can see this texture looks a bit like that underwater reflective pattern.
You get
cost six.
There's a few settings for us to play around with in the note we just made.
So let's do that.
We can change intensity to cells and that gives
us a cool stained glass version of the texture.
We can also switch around exactly what kind of distance
formula it uses but feel free to experiment with that.
Most importantly,
you can change the scale of the texture infinitely practically speaking
as you can see no matter how much I zoom in on the texture by scaling it down.
There are still no pixels or resolution problems.
Now let's say you don't want the color of the texture but you like the shapes.
Luckily the factor output is a black and white version of the color output.
Let's plug that in instead to double check
as you can see. It is a nice grayscale version of our texture.
So is there a situation why we would prefer grayscale over color?
Well grayscale or factor
is typically great for a number of different kinds
of maps including roughness maps and transparency maps.
Let's go ahead and try to plug this into the roughness value.
As you can see the cube becomes shiny during some parts and rough during other parts.
This allows the texture to drive exactly how
the roughness is distributed across the mesh.
It's important to note that sometimes the factor is
not just a grayscale version of the color output.
Instead it could be for example the alpha map or in the case of the brick texture,
it outlines the mortar of the brick
procedural textures can be very powerful especially when mixed together.
So feel free to play around with how
each one looks to better understand their algorithms