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I am planning out a future project and I am planning to create a procedural wood texture for the front of a wooden sign. I also have created some PNGs in Illustrator that I want to use as UV layers and apply over this texture for the sign's content. Is this possible? Are there any best practices for this type of desired goal?

Emilia Fredrickson
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  • Depends on how many texture maps you want to use for this wood material. If it's only color, you can simply overlay the image texture on the procedural texture with a MixRGB node. – Geri Sep 27 '21 at 18:54
  • https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/32997/how-to-place-a-png-texture-with-transparency-over-a-material – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Sep 27 '21 at 21:11

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There are several ways to do this, and as far as I know, none of them are considered always better than the others. Each has advantages and disadvantages, so it tends to depend on what your eventual goal is. Here are my three favorites.

  1. Separate models. For example, import your PNG using the Images as Planes add-on. Place the image plane against the part of the wooden model where you want your image. This is the most flexible, but does require you to parent the plane to the wooden model so you can move them together. If displacement is an issue, shrinkwrap the plane to the model.

  2. Separate BSDF nodes, using a mix shader. This works well if you have an alpha channel in your image. Here's an example:

Material using separate shader nodes

In your case, of course, my red shader would be replaced by your wood shader. This is the fastest, but it does tend to fail if the non-image shader has any sort of displacement, since the displacement isn't present in the image node.

  1. Mixing the image with the wood material using a mixRGB.

Material using one shader node and a mixRGB node

In your case, of course, my red color would be replaced by the color part of your wood shader. This overcomes the problem with displacement, since the color is fed into only one shader.

Obviously you can plug a UV Map input into the Vector input node of the image texture.

If you don't have an Alpha channel, the third approach works, except you would use overlay mode in the mixRGB node and set the factor to taste.

Marty Fouts
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