Quote from: WASasquatch on August 08, 2019, 04:18:16 PMI entirely disagree. They are basic functions, that take either colour, scalar, or vector input. What you do with them is besides the point of what they do themselves.
Blue nodes may be often used for masks but that most certainly is not really the intended use. They are raw operators and functions which you can build whole mathematic formulas from such as Hetzen's Manhattan Voronoi noise. That's where a lot of the misconceptions of blue nodes come about because the concept is pretty advanced algebra, etc.
Well I'll entirely disagree back at ya!
"What you do with them is besides the point of what they do themselves."
No, actually the exact opposite.
The point is what I can achieve using a node. In isolation the nodes don't "do" much at all. They have to be plugged into a scene before they become useful.
It may be useful from a purely intellectual exercise perspective to know what each note does independently but that is without context. We are artists (for the most part) and the nodes are our brushes and in most cases we have a visual goal in mind when we fire up Terragen, a sunset, rolling hills, an alien planet, whatever.
Quote from: N-drjuAlso, I'm afraid we didn't "nail" anything. The example that cyphyr gave (no offense) does not convince me at all - almost identical transformations can be done by just merging regular PFs or modifying a PF internal values, why would I need a function to play with color then?!
No offence taken.
The point of my example was that simply knowing what an ADD COLOUR node is doing is not very helpful without context. However knowing that you can achieve the same result with a merge node actually IS helpful. That is the beginning of a META understanding of how the nodes work. We have learnt that the ADD COLOUR node is part of the internal make-up of the merge node. (So is the MULTIPLY_COLOUR, MIX_COLOUR, SUBTRACT_COLOUR, DIVIDE_COLOUR and the scalar equivalents).
"why would I need a function to play with color then?" Because you could create a lighter weight scene than using the more complex (albeit more user-friendly)red nodes.