ColorRamp Node
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THE COLORRAMP NODE

The ColorRamp node allows you to colorize the output from any greyscale node. It can be used with those nodes that always produce a greyscale image - the maths nodes, noise, or the fractal sums, and also with nodes that produce a colour output such as clouds. In these cases, the ColorRamp node converts the colour input to shades of grey. It could also be used with a suitable image map to produce a four way blender.

Using ColorRamp to Colourize

Here, we are going to use the ColorRamp node to colourize a Turbulance node.
  1. Create your ColorRamp node.
  2. Plug a Turbulance node into the Input attribute of the ColorRamp.
  3. Set the Input value to one.
Color1 will be replace black in the Input node, Color2 dark grey, Color3 light grey and Color4 white. Try setting Color1 and Color2 to shades of brown and Color3 and Color4 to blues to produce a simple puddle effect.

Using ColorRamp as a four way blender

To do this, you will need a four level greyscale input. You can create this in any paint package, and plug it in as a Image Map, or you can use maths nodes to produce our image from any greyscale node.
  1. Create your ColorRamp node.
  2. Plug a maths node into the Input attribure
  3. Set the maths node to Divide, Value1=1 and Value2=3 (You might need to change this depending on your final node.
  4. Plug another maths node into the Value1 attribute of the Divide node.
  5. Set this to a Round node. Set Value1 to 4.
  6. Plug any greyscale image into the Value1 attribute. I've used a Turbulance node again, but any will do.
The resulting ColorRamp should show the four colours in clear bands. If it does not, experiement with the Divide value from step 2 until you get the correct result.

You can now plug your four textures or four procedurals into the color attributes of the ColorRamp, to produce a four way split.

A sample clothes texture, produced by pluging a noise node into all four colour attributes of the ColorRamp, with the min set to 0.5 and max to 1.


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