manipulating grass to appear as mosses. lichens & fungi too.

[dandelO]

For quickness, I've just used Walli's Noble One tree.

The image you'd normally use for the leaves is on the left.

[attachimg=#]

But when you try to apply a new colour(blue) for diffuse, it doesn't work very well, giving a strange purpley colour because it's mixing the already coloured image with my new blue.

[attachimg=#]

If I desaturate the image, however(right-hand leaf image), I can use that greyscale version and apply it by the same blue colour I used above, which will now work correctly.

[attachimg=#]

[TheBadger]

Thanks for the illustration on this martin. But I have a few more questions and will probably have to be talked through this.

1) So I have to make a copy of the image for color and desat it in photoshop? Or do I do it in the node?

2) Will making any changes effect my original plant object, or will the changes I make only effect the project I'm working on?

3) I want the greens I am changing the plant to, to be like other plants I have in the image/project, can I from within the node sample the color I want to make the new color?

[Dune]

1. That's the easiest (though there's another way), just save as a grayscale copy (don't destroy the original), and reload. If you do save as the original, all your future plants from this object will be gray. If you reload that grayscale in this project it only affects this project, as the information is stored in the tgd.
2. Answered
3. I don't think so, or you could change the image maps form the other plants to grayscale as well, and just vary the node colors to match eachother.

[Tangled-Universe]

Martin, what happens if you do the following with your coloured texture:

1) click on diffuse colour in the texture channel
2) set the value for blue of the RGB values to 0 or something much lower as it already is
3) mix in your separate blue

The first two steps are in general a good, quick and easy way without creating separate texture to desaturate textures.
When my texture is too green I simply reduce the green in the RGB channel of the diffuse colour setting.

The same works for GI. If you set strength on surface to 2 or 3 or higher it often gets a weird hue, based on the dominant shade of the terrain.
For instance if you have red rocks the GI can give very red/orange burned shadows. Reducing the red colour in the GI colour gives more neutral shadows.

[TheBadger]

Please continue your thoughts

Also, I have to say, its a little funny that the things I think will be hard are often rather simple, and the things I thought would be easy (like this) are rather hard... So what I get from this discussion is that when I change my color, I will be doing it blind. That is, from working with the gray scale I can not be sure I will get the exact green I am going for?

T-U will you please elaborate on what you were saying about just altering the RGB channel.