While exploring Blender, I’ve found a few procedural things I could limit on a single mesh with vertex groups (eg. physics simulations and geometry nodes). I’m wondering if there is something similar for things like bump maps? As in, can I have multiple normal maps affect different parts of a single mesh?
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Yeah, you can mask normal maps however you want, just use a Mix node to combine them and the mask as the factor
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Hello !
Yes you can access vertex group inside a material like this :
Where IDX is the name of my vertex group / Attribute.
Here I’m mixing two bump nodes, and it will work with normal maps.
Keep in mind that normal maps are strange beast, like if you mix two maps with 50% opacity, you can get weird looking results, and it’s not always easy to spot them at first glance.
But if you mix one area that uses 100% opacity of one normal map, and another one that use 100% of another you should be safe !
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Mask? What kind of mask? The documentation gave me three different articles with the same name.
Am I doing something wrong?
The circled face is the face that I’ve dubbed as the “Front” in the vertex groups, but it isn’t getting those funny shaped dots from the voronoi texture.
Alright, it’s been 5 minutes and now doing some tests with the brick texture is yielding some pretty funny stuff. It works with the vertex groups that aren’t the front, but doesn’t with the front vertex group?
And while I’m here, what does it mean when the surface just becomes really reflective, even if I didn’t adjust any of the settings in the Principled BSDF node? So far, this issue has popped up the two times I had a few incorrect settings for some textures, but I don’t see any relationships between the two.
It’s hard to tell, try to post an image once that append !
Good luck !
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The first time it happened gave me a two week headache and it looked like this:
I solved it by setting the texture to non-color, but I still don’t fully understand why Blender thought it would be logical to make half the mesh shiny.
The second time it happened was while I was testing out what you told me to do.
This time, though, it affected the entire mesh.
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As far as I undersatand you, what you’re looking for is called “UV mapping”. Try to find some tutorials about that on youtube.
Hello !
Yes until you get a clear understanding on how normal maps works you might end up with situation where the shading is wrong , in your case these nodes aren’t plugged correctly :
this is a correct wiring :
You can try either Generated , UV or Object for textures coordinates.
Also check the input/output colors, most of the time and especially when dealing with normal you need to have their colors matching.
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Ah yes, UV mapping was also related to the problem last time. However my question is why Blender does this. Why not turn the entire thing hot pink, like it usually does when it doesn’t have an image in the texture node? Or black, like when nothing is connected to the output? Why make a seemingly random section of the mesh shiny?
The new set up for the texture is working, but the vertex limiting part still isn’t working.
@joseph Earlier in this topic, you were talking about masks? What are they? The only mask I’m getting from the documentation is the one in sculpt mode.
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I meant a mask as - a black and white texture used as the Factor for a Mix node. This can be a procedural texture, an image texture, a combination of math nodes, really anything you can make with shader nodes can output a black and white output
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Yeah, it’s a bit confusing at first, but everything in shader nodes eventually bakes down to numbers 
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