How to add a random seed to a noise texture

hi all

this is my first post here. I use blender for some months now, and now I’m stuck.

I did build this texture where the highlighted noise texture controls the difference between rust and paint:

(sorry, if this image is to big for your screen!)
But as you can see in the bottom you can see, when I dublicate the object it is exactly the same. How can make this noise texture randomly generate noise?

Also I was wondering, I imported one image as a plane, I want it to be the screen of a monitor, placed it in front of the monitor, dublicated monitor + screen with texture, rotated the new monitor with the positioned screen texture as a plane and then wanted to change one of the textures. But when I change one of them, the other one changes too, how do I unlink dublicated objects? I can open a new thread for that but I think it fits here as well.

Does this help?

it kind of helps. With the exact same settings on the noise texture it becomes wavy circles. or circly waves?

When I use generated node of the texture coordinate and the location of the object info it gets more what I want

It is fun to move to object around and see the texture change all the time. this is the behaviour I want, but the texture pattern is messed up. look at the preview, these are all circles. Where is the random area factor of the noise texture gone? Even tweaking the settings of the noise texture now generates more circles rather than areas with fuzzy borders.

You’re using the math node to subtract the vectors… vectors have 3 components, but the math node only works with one, and it will treat the vector as a color and convert it to grayscale, and then subtract those grayscale values. This is not what you want!

You need to use the MixRGB set to ‘subtract’ (‘add’ also works), with the factor set to 1.
Or separateXYZ for both vectors, subtract (or add) each component from each vector, and combineXYZ the results.
EDIT: And, of course, you can use the ‘VectorMath’ node! :wink:

Sometimes it’s also usefull to multiply the random by some big vector or float, specially if your meshes are bigger than 1BU (blender unit).

Using UV Maps:
use the vector math node set to add with the UV and Location plugged in

Using Proc Textures:
the Generated coordinates alone should work. if not, then same as above but the Object coords instead of the UV.

EDIT: the solution above using the random and not location is a good one too.

Noise up the random output to generate color output. I use Scale:42.5, Detail:0, Distortion:42.5 - with whole numbers and/or low numbers I’m not getting consistent color output. Then possibly multiply that result with 10-100 in all three channels to offset the random location even more.

This should be okay when using noise texture as a generator as you do here. But if musgrave texture is used I always add some fixed vector to the Generated Texture coordinate output in order to prevent no visible point has the 0,0,0 location. That location has some peculiar features that show up. Not a bug, simply how the parts of the musgrave works I guess.

So: Object info/Random (grey) -> Noise (42.5,0,42.5) (turns grey into “color”) -> Color mix multiply (some factor) -> Add (why subtract?) to Texture Coord.

Basically the random float 0-1 is turned into a random color RGB0-1 and then multiplied with a scaling factor so output is now i.e. RGB0-10, which is then added to the original texture object/generated output. With a very small scaling factor, i.e. 0.01, you’d see only minor differences in the textures, so scale it until they completely separate (depends on the object scale).

I really wish we had a color random output as well to avoid all this. Where none of the channels was equal to the float random output.