*@Feby Kristianto* You can totally do that! There is not really a single correct way to do it. I personally, instead of using a gradient texture, would have just used the Y-component of the Generated coordinates. But if you are more comfortable with that, that's fine too.

@Leslie Solorzano Good point, I should have mentioned this. Yes, it is due to the RGB representation of XYZ. The blue component comes from Z and the Generated coordintaes behave a little bit funky when the object is a plane with no height because they stretch between the limits. For a plane both limits in Z are the same so the Z component is unclear, but it is defined as 0.5 .

So subtracting 0.5 from the z component brings it to 0 and thus removes the blue tint. But eventually the Z component does not matter at all because it is getting multiplied with 0 in the following node.

@Blender Daily There is actually a mathematical difference between the two that results in a visual difference as well. The distance actually changes how the normals are calculated in respect to how strong the bump is interpreted, while strength simply blends the result with the input normals.

So my suggestion is to always set the correct distance first and then tone it down with the strength if necessary.

by the way, how to select every value in a node at once like you did with the first vector math node?

*@Huân Lê-Vương* Everywhere in blender when there are multiple values to define something like a vector, you can click and drag along the fields from top to bottom to change all at the same time

*@Simon Thommes* thanks! another question, why the min value of the map range is higher than the max value (before the roughness)?

*@Huân Lê-Vương* The 'To Min' and 'To Max' inputs simply determine where the 'From ...' values are mapped to, so flipping these around is an easy way to invert the map, while you are defining the levels. 'Max' does not have to necessarily be higher than 'Min', that is just a name to easily differentiate between them.

*@Simon Thommes* thanks!

*@victor p* You can simply use the file of the result and delete the material or start just using a simple plane, as I am doing in the video.

In all the workflow examples I am using quite simple base setups.

*@Alex* You are probably using an outdated version of Blender, there have been a lot of new options coming to the math node in recent Blender versions. You can download the latest version of Blender here: https://www.blender.org/download/

*@Simon Thommes* Oh how could I not think of that myself. Thank you!

Ignore - I just couldn't reproduce the problem in the subsequent try. Very helpful tutorial Simon. Thank you!

@Tighe Racicot That is the case only as long as the mesh of the object itself does not change. When you go into edit mode and scale the plane, you can see that Generated coordinates adapt to the bounding box of the mesh.

@Simon Thommes Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by adapt. I've set up a test, one with Generated with the midpoint and min,max shifted, and another with Object as is. Both are wired up to a Noise node. When I preview either and scale in edit mode, they both seem behave the same. The plane is scaled larger, with the additional generated noise filling the canvas—no stretching from the Object node which is what I thought you meant. Maybe it's a mute point, I'm just trying to understand these nodes since up until now they've totally mystified me.

@Tighe Racicot I assume you're using Eevee for the preview. There you need to exit edit mode to see the change take effect. In Cycles the update is immediate.

@fu233 the regular math node does not handle vectors, so it will convert them into regular values instead

@Franziska Meister Thank you, I appreciate it! Generally I tried to include all the techniques that I'm using in this training series. Applying that properly is just a matter of practice and getting creative with combining them.

For the tree trunks I started with making a couple of procedural base textures that would replicate some of the shapes and patterns in our concept art for the tree bark. A lot of that process is very similar to what I'm showing specifically in the Wooden Boards or Rainy Window examples.

The main trick to try and make it look organic (while still stylized) was to do a lot of layering of detail, rather than using a single procedural texture on it's own. The setups are also included in the shot packs you can download: https://studio.blender.org/films/sprite-fright/3a29f46b66bd34/

Though I can't exactly recommend to try and untangle the node-trees, as I never had the time to clean them up and nowadays I would build things a bit differently. But maybe it helps you out.

Also keep in mind that, while I went for the fully procedural approach, that's not always the best way to go, especially with more complex setups like this. I hope this helps :)