Is having no map the same as an all-white map?

RobertDy

I have a dress which uses an opacity map since it has an intricate pattern. To whiten the dress (it's white but grayish), I dialed up the diffuse overlay strength without inserting a map. I then added a bloodstain on the dress and for this I had to use a map, since having no map meant that the blood patch would be almost invisible. So for this diffuse overly map, what I did was make an all-white map and the blood stain was blackened, but the result (the white areas, not the blood stain) looked slightly different than without a map. I thought no map = all white or am I missing something?

felis

I don't think I can follow what you are doing, maybe attach some images.

In general if there is a map it will get multiplied with the value (or colour) of the slider for the resulting effect.

But you should be aware of, that channels are affecting each other, so solely changing one channel might not give the result you expect.

Escribano

RobertDy said:

I have a dress which uses an opacity map since it has an intricate pattern. To whiten the dress (it's white but grayish), I dialed up the diffuse overlay strength without inserting a map. I then added a bloodstain on the dress and for this I had to use a map, since having no map meant that the blood patch would be almost invisible. So for this diffuse overly map, what I did was make an all-white map and the blood stain was blackened, but the result (the white areas, not the blood stain) looked slightly different than without a map. I thought no map = all white or am I missing something?

It might be easier if you just made a custom map for the base color. Copy the default base color map and open it in a graphics editing program. Adjust the brightness/contrast until it is as white as you want it to be (which it sounds like you may have done already when making the overlay map).

Then, you can add the bloodstain directly to the image. Use that custom map for the base color, and leave the overlay at zero. The colors should remain as you want them, as long as you restore the rest of the settings to their default values.

If you want to try something a bit more sophisticated, you can apply the bloodstain alone via the diffuse overlay instead of adding it to the base color map. You would need two png images; one in color, and one plain white to serve as an opacity map. You need to use png format so that the background is completely blank on both images. You put the white png image in diffuse overlay weight, and the color png image in diffuse overlay color. You won't see the bloodstain in the viewport, but it should be in the rendered image.

lilweep

No idea what OP is describing. A picture says a thousand words.

Generally, a pure white texture map is exactly the same as if the Shader parameter value was set to 1. 

Black = 0

White = 1

But the shader slider value is also important as multiplies the image texture values.

So if shader slider is 0 but map is white, that's still 0 x 1 = 0