We should now look at some of the other parameters and features of the texture editor. It's important that you know where they are located in the interface, and also how they affect your output texture. These features include the antialias settings, color gradient ,blend modes, and some of the procedural parameters affecting the way in which our pattern looks.

Here is our texture editor interface again. The interface is pretty well described in the online reference manual that comes with WCS, so I'm going to focus on the features that are relevant to this stage in the tutorial. We are using simple texture types at this stage, so I'll leave the explanation of the texture swatches on the right until later on. I'm also going to deal with remapping textures in the next part of the tutorial, so those two little texture buttons next to "Remap Function 1" and "Remap Function 2" will be explained, don't you worry!

That really doesn't leave us much to cover in this section, but we'll play around with the settings anyhow, just to get a feel for it.

1. Open up your TexturesEverywhere.proj file, and double click on our ground cover component, then switch to the materials tab and click on the button to launch us back into the Texture Editor interface.

2. Look at the middle of the interface, where the color gradient is located:

At the moment, we have two colors defined on our gradient - red and blue. One is at the far left of the gradient (0%) and the other is far right (100%). This tells the editor to use red and blue and blend between them using intermediate colors. The result as seen in our pattern is a fractal noise pattern going from red to blue through various purple shades.

What if we wanted more than 2 colors in our gradient? There are a couple of ways we could do this:

3. Click on the add new color button

4. A requester will appear asking us at what point on the gradient we would like the new color to appear:

5. Leave the value at 50% (ie: halfway along the gradient) and click OK.

6. A new random color will be added to the gradient at the halfway point.

7. Click on the color pin that corresponds to the new color, and then click in the color well to the right of the gradient. The now familiar color picker interface will appear.

8. Select a nice bright contrasty color - lime green will do (RGB 0,255,0)

9. Do a preview render. See what happened? Now our pattern goes from red to blue via green (and all colors in-between!)

10. Well, that's one way of doing it, but if exact placement of a color pin is not required, you can left click on the gradient itself to add a new color pin. Try it now. Note that WCS chooses another random color for the pin. Be aware that any selected color pin can be accurately positioned at any point by entering an exact value into the gradient position (%) field:

11. In order to see the changes we'll be making later on, let's remove the nasty green color: Select the green color pin by clicking on the small colored box below the the dark line in the gradient. If you click in the gradient itself, you'll just add another color. You'll know you have the right color selected when the color well to the right of the gradient contains a lime green shade. Note that the pin shows it's selected by making the bottom of the pin bold. From now on, whenever I refer to the term "pin" it means the color box attached to a color line in a gradient.

12. Click the delete button that is immediately adjacent to the color gradient.

13. Now our color range has been restored back to our original blue and red.

14. Our fractal noise still has low contrast though. There are lots of intermediate purple shades and few areas of pure red or blue. WCS provides three ways in which you can modify this default behavior: placement of color pins, blending modes and remap functions. I'll be dealing with remap functions in the next part of the tutorial, for now, let's have a look at the other two ways:

15. Click on our red pin to select it.

16. Click and drag the pin to the right, about a third of the way along the gradient. If you need precise positioning (or you work that way naturally), then enter the required value into the gradient position field.

17. Do the same for the blue pin, but drag it to the left until it sits at about 65%.

18. Do a preview render again. This time the blending of colors is only happening over a third of the range of values generated by the fractal noise element. This has resulted in more red and blue, and fewer shades of purple, in other words, a higher contrast pattern.

19. Move the blue pin to 50% on the gradient.

20. Move the red pin back to 0%

21. Reselect the blue pin.

22. Click on the drop down list to the right of the color swatch - it should say Full Blend at the moment:

23. Select Sharp Edge from the list - you may have to scroll up in the list in order to find it: it's right at the top.

24. Do another preview render to get an idea of how our changes have affected the pattern. Wow! That's contrasty, all right! There are no longer any purple shades - all we have is red and blue.

Save your project at this point.

Note: The Blend mode change affects the blend between the selected pin and the one before it in the gradient (ie: to the left). Make sure you have the correct pin selected before changing the blend mode.

25. Try some of the other blend modes to get a feel for what they do, and start to think where you might use them in your own textures.

So, that's all there is to adding, removing and blending colors on the texture editor color gradient. If you find that two color pins are too close together for you to select the one that you want, you can cycle through the pins in either direction by using the two tiny arrow buttons to either side of the gradient itself . You can keep track of which pin is selected, by watching the color swatch to the right of the gradient, which will be updated automatically as you cycle through the pins.

The only other things that I think are worth mentioning in this part of the tutorial are the antialias settings.

Antialiasing is the process by which jagged pixelated edges within your texture are smoothed off. Remember, these patterns are infinitely scalable (they are procedurally, or mathematically generated). If you zoom in on a texture, you will not see pixelation (unless that texture has image elements). WCS does however have a setting for antialiasing that will smooth the internal gradients within the pattern.

26. You can enable texture antialiasing by selecting the Antialias checkbox in the texture editor interface:

The Samples field allows you to set the number of "passes" if you like, that WCS will apply to the texture. Higher numbers will result in a smoother texture, but at the expense of rendering time. Antialiasing is processor intensive, so it will slow down rendering of textures, even to the small preview windows in the texture editor interface. I suggest you leave it deselected unless really necessary. In test renders on my machine, a preview render of our high contrast blue and red texture with antialiasing at the default settings it took 25 seconds. With samples set to 5, it took 1 minute and 02 seconds! I ought to point out that there was minimal difference between the rendered output in stills. In animated sequences, too little texture antialiasing can cause textures to "flicker".

Last but not least, we must quickly examine some of the procedural parameters for Fractal Noise. There is not time to cover every parameter for every element in detail, but we should at least have a look at some that obviously affect the way your texture looks, have a direct effect on rendering speed, or are easy to understand!

27. Click in the Octaves field in the procedural parameters and change the value from its default (6) to 1 (its lowest setting).

28. Do a preview render.

29. You might be forgiven for thinking that we had increased the scale of our fractal noise, but in fact we have just reduced the complexity of that noise. Imagine that this pattern is generated by sound waves (weird, I know, but bear with me!). Adding another octave of sound would shorten the wavelength, adding a layer of complexity to the existing sound. Add 2 octaves and you start to really distort the original waveform. This is essentially what adding octaves to a texture in WCS will do. It maintains the overall "shape" of the pattern, but just adds complexity in boundary areas.

30. Increase the octaves field in increments of one and rerender to get a sense of what is happening here. Be aware that as we increase the number of octaves (as with antialias samples), so the rendering time increases. Note: Chris Hanson of 3D Nature has confirmed that WCS is "intelligent" enough to cull unnecessary octaves when they start to detract from the texture and just add aliasing noise (jaggies), thus you will be able to set this as high as you wish, and only have WCS render the detail that will be visible.

31. The Input Seed field is essentially a random number field for generation of the texture. Enter a different number in here to change the distribution of red and blue in our pattern. If two of us use the same parameters exactly, our rendered output will be the same. If one of us then changes the input seed field by just 1, the patterns will be different. Note: Changing the input seed where present to any number other than 0 is a good idea. Fractal textures with an input seed of 0 can sometimes display what appear to be repeating patterns within the texture.

32. The Roughness field controls the smoothness of the boundary between our two colors. Try values of both 0% and 100% and do preview renders to see the effect this is having. Note: You will need to have at least 2 Octaves in your texture, or this parameter will have no effect.

33. The Lacunarity field lets you stretch or compress the frequency interval between octaves. This lets you vary the fractal noise pattern. You can also use it to avoid repetitive patterns in the noise. At a value of 50%, each octave will be twice the frequency of the previous octave. This can potentially show repetitive patterns in the noise. By compressing or stretching the interval between the octaves, you can avoid regular patterns in your turbulence. It's best to avoid even multiples of 25, hence the default is 51. I rarely change the setting from its default, but feel free to experiment.

34. The Brightness and Contrast fields allow you to control the width of the conceptual gradient "window". If you increase brightness to, say 50%, your texture will only use the values found on the gradient between 50% to 100%. Lowering Contrast to 75 % will force the texture to be generated from the range of values found between 50% and 75%. Experiment with different values, and the behavior should make itself apparent.

The other pattern generators have their own settings - the settings I've described only apply to Fractal Noise (and its variants - Hybrid Multifractal, Multifractal etc) and Turbulence.

There is insufficient space in this tutorial to go through every parameter for every element. We'll look at some of the other elements in the next and later parts of this tutorial. In the meantime, I suggest you refer to the online help file that comes with WCS for excellent descriptions of the various parameters and what they affect.

If I haven't lost you completely or sent you to sleep, Part 4 of the tutorial will be dealing with remapping functions - what they are, how they work, and more importantly, how you can make them work for you!