Can you convert a shader mask to geometry in Geometry Nodes?

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Hi I’m curious if it’s possible to convert a material shader’s mask into geometry somehow? I was thinking it might be possible with geometry nodes, but not sure how to access the shader mask specifically. Any ideas? I’m using Blender 3.3 btw. Thanks! Here’s a ss of what I"m talking about.

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Welcome to BA :slight_smile:
If I understand you correctly, you don’t even need geo nodes, just plug your texture into a Displacement node

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Hello !
Hard to say that something is impossible with GN, but it’s very tricky.

Part of the solution is to recreate the mask in GN, because you can go from GN to shader but not the other way around , unless you bake the texture and load it in GN.

Then the question is how to generate the geo, but for that there are more solution.

It might be better to look for another solution.

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You can bake your texture from shader editor to Vertex color and use it in geo nodes

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Thanks @joseph for the warm welcome and the suggestion. Actually the mask isn’t a texture but a procedural mask. I did pipe this into Displacement for funsies to just see what it would do, but the mesh is too low polygon. The idea was to convert the procedural mask somehow into geometry in some way for use as a high polygon Nanite mesh in UE5.

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Yeah so far like you said I can’t find a way to send this attribute from the shader to GN. Your idea of trying to recreate the procedural mask in GN is something to look into. Thanks @sozap for the reply!

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Oh thanks for the cool take @higgsas. That’s very interesting. My model isn’t high poly enough to bake the info into VC without a lot of model prepping for it. I was hoping to be able to use the procedural mask I made somehow into a separate mesh with whatever poly count I specify if that makes sense that was independent of the object that the mask is on.

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Thats possible with geonodes, you could pass through your model, whilst a hidden remesh, up res, subdivision or whatever happens and then shrink wrap/raycast it back on. all in geonodes.

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Your model looks good for this I think you could use pointiness/dirty vertex col and extract that from a highpoly mesh.

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Thanks @AlphaChannel I’ll try to incorporate your idea into my GN experiment. :smiley:

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