Fundamentals of Masking — ‘Copy’ Blending Mode

As shown in the screenshot below, my background color is set to a shade of yellow, and the foreground color is set to a shade of blue. The blend mode is left at the default mode, which is “Copy”.

What the ‘Copy’ blending mode does is it directly outputs the foreground color without any alteration, unless we plug something into the ‘Opacity’ pin. When we connect something to the ‘Opacity’ pin, we initiate our masking process.

Here, I’m connecting a black and white texture (a polygon) to the opacity input. This causes the black parts of my ‘Polygon’ texture to display the foreground texture (blue), while the white parts remove the background texture (yellow):

Another example:

To further elaborate, my brick texture is in the background. I want to display my grunge texture (foreground) on top of the brick texture (background). When I plug my polygon texture into the opacity channel, it cuts through my brick texture, removing the white parts from it while preserving the black areas, and fills the white areas (mask) with the foreground texture.

So, in short, black parts do not affect the background texture at all, and the action happens in the white areas.

We can use any grayscale texture to make such alterations:

The black parts in the gradient preserve the blue areas (background texture), so no alteration occurs there, as mentioned. However, in the white parts, the blue is removed and replaced with yellow (foreground texture).

This is the most fundamental aspect of masking in Substance 3D Designer and a very commonly used method, even though it might appear simple. If you are interested in it and would like me to create a more detailed tutorial on this subject, feel free to leave a comment.

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Substance 3D Designer Blending Modes Explained

I will divide this section in two parts, fundamental blending modes and advanced level blending modes. So some information at the advanced section might be a bit hard to grasp without getting comfortable with Substance Designer, so if that’s the case, please don’t worry about it. Over time things click!

What is a blending method?

Blending methods are used to blend or mix two images or colors, etc.

There are many of these, but let’s start with the essentials:

Add (Linear Dodge) — Essential

Takes the white areas in the foreground texture and adds them to the background texture

My background texture ‘Brick 1’ with no alterations:

Now I want to ‘add’ that star shape (foreground) to my background texture:

Subtract — Essential

Does the opposite of ‘Add (Linear Dodge)’. It subtracts the white information in the foreground texture from the background texture.

Note: We can always swap the pins to get the opposite effect or add an invert node to one of the textures to achieve different results.

Multiply — Essential

Takes the black parts of the foreground texture and combines textures in such a way that the darker parts of both textures dominate.

See how the black parts of the star shape dominate the entire texture?

Overlay — Essential

This one is a bit more complex to explain, but let’s give it a try. For areas where the base texture (background) is darker than 50% gray, the overlay mode multiplies the base texture (background) with the blend texture, darkening the result. A great simplification to understand how it works would be (even though this isn’t exactly how it operates), it takes the black parts of the foreground texture and overlays them on top of the black parts of the background image.

A very important note: This blending mode relies on ‘gray areas’ to function. It wouldn’t work at all if both textures are purely white and black. Therefore, the foreground texture should be grayscale, with the background texture containing some black areas. If both textures are purely black and white (referred to as binary textures with no grayscale values), the overlay blending mode will not work.

Another point to be careful about is that, for example, we will not observe any change in the following setup:

This is because we are placing the grunge effect on top of bricks. But if we swap the textures:

Switch (Advanced)

This one takes three inputs: The base texture (background), the blend texture (foreground), and a grayscale mask texture (Mask). If the corresponding pixel in the mask texture (Mask) is closer to white (higher intensity), the output pixel will be taken from blend texture/foreground texture. If the corresponding pixel in the mask texture (Mask) is closer to black (lower intensity), the output pixel will be taken from base texture/background)

To grasp it better, we can think of it as taking the white parts from the foreground texture.

Add Sub (Advanced)

It subtracts the blend texture (foreground) from the base texture (background). Then, it adds this difference back to the base texture (background). The important bit here is that, this results in an effect where areas where foreground is darker than background become lighter, and vice-versa. Essentially, it enhances contrast and detail by amplifying differences between the two textures.

Divide (Advanced)

This one makes the areas where Texture B (foreground) is darker than Texture A (background) lighter in the output and makes the areas where Texture B (foreground) is lighter than Texture A (background) darker in the output. This mode is generally used to achieve enhanced details, in roughness maps or height maps, where subtle variations are desired. It’s also useful to normalize intensity or strength of the textures based on specific criteria defined by another texture and can be also used to normalize textures. For example, dividing a height map by a curvature map to modulate surface detail.

Screen (Advanced)

Used to brighten the base texture (background) by blending it with the inverted and multiplied version of the blend texture (foreground). White areas in the blend texture (foreground) make the corresponding pixels in the base texture (background) lighter while dark areas in the blend texture have less effect on the base texture. It is generally used to combine textures to create lighting effects or enhancing brightness.

Soft Light (Advanced)

Mimics the effect of shining a soft light source onto the base texture (background) based on the intensity of the blend texture (foreground). For blend texture values less than 0.5, it darkens the base texture and increases contrast. For blend texture values greater than or equal to 0.5, it lightens the base texture while maintaining contrast.

Min (Darken) (Advanced)

Min (Stands for Minimum) and this blend mode takes two images and combines them by choosing the darkest pixel from each pair of corresponding pixels in the two images. This means for each spot in the combined image, it will look at the same spot in both original images and pick the darker color. This way, the resulting image highlights the darker areas from both images. We can think of it as taking the white parts of the foreground texture and laying them on top of the white parts of the background texture.

Max (Lighten) (Advanced)

Does the opposite of the “Min (Darken)” mode. It takes two images and combines them by choosing the brightest pixel from each pair of corresponding pixels in the two images. For each spot in the combined image, it looks at the same spot in both original images and picks the brighter color. This way, the resulting image highlights the lighter areas from both images. In plain English, it’ll take the black parts of the foreground texture and lay them on top of the black parts of the background texture.

Conclusion

It would take some tinkering in Substance 3D Designer to fully grasp these concepts, but if you have any questions, feel free to send a message to me!