Help with this uniform color node- red dashed line

[Xuyang Z]

I try to add a grunge map here, but the color is not showing. Anyone knows what couse this? Thanks a lot!

[radlolyoshi5E2E · Accepted solution]

This is because the background texture is a grayscale image, so the texture inserted on the foreground MUST be the same type of image(in this case, grayscale). If you want to convert the grunge to a color, I suggest using a gradient map on the grunge map. The one key takeaway from this, is that the half orange half grey symbol on a mode means that what type you put in there will likely depend on what type you insert into other parts of that node.

[radlolyoshi5E2E]

But if you would like to still use a blend(there are numerous use cases where a blend would be smarter than a gradient map) to make the base color, I would suggest (in your case) blending the noise and the texture together and then creating a blend node, attaching a uniform color to each foreground/background node, and attaching the blended grayscale texture in the mask slot

[radlolyoshi5E2E]

Or just using the noise as a mask instead of the full texture then making the texture (without the noise blended in) whatever color you like, and using a blend color or something

[davescm · Accepted solution]

In addition to the information given by @radlolyoshi5E2E , you will see that many nodes have a dot in one of the input connectors. That input is the primary input and is used for inheritance of parameters such as output size and also where a node can be colour or grayscale which of the two is chosen.

You can read more about inheritance here : https://substance3d.adobe.com/documentation/sddoc/inheritance-in-substance-compositing-graphs-225971...

Dave