Is it possible to use node textures as inputs for Cycles material nodes?

I was interested in playing with texture nodes (like discussed at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Texture_Nodes ) but everything I saw had to do with Blender Render, not Cycles, and I kept running into issues when trying to do it in Cycles. Even when I got a node texture, I couldn’t find a way to access it from a Cycles node material.

While I’m just playing at this, there are a couple of reasons I’d like to do this. One is to have access to texture node inputs like time curve. Another is to be able to create a texture that I can use both in my materials and in things like displacement modifiers, without having to re-bake every time I tweak a value or animate something.

Is this just not something that’s supported for Cycles?

No, not supported. It’s a separate bunch of code that cannot be run from within Cycles. If you need it for displacement, you may be able to use the displacement function within Cycles instead of the modifier. Depends on how exactly you were using the displace modifier.

Thank you. That’s disappointing, but I’m glad I didn’t waste too much time on it.

To me it’s sad, too, that it doesn’t work. The texture nodes have quite a few gimmicks which are missing in cycles materials. I recently learned about a workaround, though:

  • create your texture in the node editor
  • switch render from cycles to blender render
  • in 3d editor create a plane
  • unwrap it, map texture on it
  • use ‘bake’ in the render tab (setting ‘bake mode’ to ‘textures’)
  • you will get a bitmap image (in the image editor) of your texture
  • save that image to a file
  • switch back to cycles rendering
  • add a image texture node to your material, and choose the saved image created above.

It is not perfect, as the resulting texture with be of finite extend (and in general non-periodic), but for many cases it will do.

Thanks, omgold. Baking the tex works great for a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, baking textures isn’t as flexible or animatable as I would like.