On the preview you can see the noise node group (highlighted in red) that generates displacement map (blue nodes). Now here’s the interesting part:
I wan’t to use this procedural map for particle distribution.
The only way that I’ve found is to bake this map from top view and use it as a texture in particle system. But that’s a disgusting hack. Beside, there are mapping problems with it.
Is there a way to pass procedural noise information to vertex paint or vertex selection / groups / weigths?
You can bake the image and use it to modulate a vertex weight edit modifier. Which answers your question-- but it sounds like what you dislike about using it directly as a particle density texture is that you have to bake.
You have all the mapping tools you need inside nodes, before you bake it, to convert it to work on any UV map you want.
Well, I’m lazy af. Didn’t even bother with unwrapping. Just went straight to generated/object coordinates and procedural textures, which were working fine up to this point.
The problem with baking is that you need to bake new map every time you change procedural noise on wich the bake is made. Linked map from node to particle system would automate this.
I know about mapping node. I use it a lot, but I found that without UV map it’s hard to precisely sync scale of the baked map with the model. Or maybe I just borked my bake somehow. I will try again. Previously I’ve baked height maps, but eventually swaped them for fully automated node based setup for converting object height to color values.
To be honest I think that baking it’s still more a workaround than the proper solution to particle mapping. At least in procedural / highpoly stuff.
