I’m trying to texture a credit card chip…
…I made this in GIMP…
(with alpha)
…and I’ve been messing around with with nodes, but I’m struggling…
…result. As you can see, not even close. The noise texture was working well until I tried adding the black lines.
OK… so, a mix shader has 3 inputs: two materials and a factor. The factor can either be a number or a texture… or something else. If it’s set to 0.5 the output will be 50% of one material and 50% of the other. If the input is a texture then this texture is used to mix between the two nodes: Black is entirely input 1, white is entirely input 2, and grey is a mix.
So at the moment you have a gold group leading into a principled shader, set to metallic. I’m not sure if this is a colour or a texture, but so far it looks fine. You then use a mix node and use a noise texture to mix it with… nothing. Nothing will count as absolute black here. Not the cleanest way of doing things here, but it works to add some texture to the gold. Then you have a 50% mix between this and another material - a black and white plastic material with your image as a texture.
I think what you meant to do is use your image texture as the fac input of the second mix shader, and just have a black or dark grey as the colour input for the second principled shader.
Maybe something like this? You might need to clean up your mask texture a touch though.
Chip.blend (125.3 KB)
Yeah, I wasn’t sure how to add the noise texture to the gold color only, without using a mix shader. I take your point about it being messy. This is the inside of the metal color input, I believe I made this node from a tutorial a couple years ago before the principal shader came around.
The
You can put the noise through a colour ramp and into colour… and/or you could put it into the roughness of the gold principled.
Hey that’s pretty good Leigh, yeah it’s a bit messy I can clean that up a bit. I’m not great with nodes, I’m been focusing on modelling until recently, so the first image texture is providing the noise?
Yeah your image texture already has noise in it, so that’ll do if you want the noise for color. Just feed it straight into the Principled shader. If you wanted to use noise for bump though it would be a different story.
I wanted the gold to have separate noise as I was planning on doing some very close renders so I need it to be very sharp.
Try this then. If you want to get in close you really, really need to create a higher resolution mask texture. It will also make it easier for you if you make it only pure black and white with no shades of grey.
Chip.blend (195.8 KB)
Your chip alpha texture should be used to mix between two materials instead of just driving the colour of the second principled shader. This is because of how the chip is constructed. The black parts you see are actually the underlying plastic substrate, where the gold has been removed. You also need to add a bump/displacement because if you look closely, the black parts are recessed too.
Something like this:
