Cycles material node help needed

Good day all

I haven’t been here for a couple years. Was starting to get along OK with Blender, but life intervened and a lot of sorely acquired knowledge slipped away. Getting back into it now and would really appreciate some help on the Cycles nodes.

I’m using image textures - but the tree has no effect. All I have to do is open an image texture node and the texture shows up on the model, without even connecting the node to the tree! This would be great, but I need to do some rotating and scaling, plus some other manipulation, but these nodes have no effect. Obviously I’m somehow importing the texture image directly as a shader, but can’t figure out how - I do have “Use nodes” ticket.

Related Q - how do I connect normal, specular and ambient occlusion images to the node tree?

Hi,
basically


Thanks so much for the clear way you’ve set this out :slight_smile: