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I would like to take textures and procedurally scale them with math nodes, not mapping nodes to re-use easily similar to other programs scale input nodes. I can't seem to find anything on this. I found rotation topics, but not scaling.

WASasquatch
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1 Answers1

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If you mean to do this in the material setups, you have to modify the coordinates one way or another in order to scale. The usual way is to feed the appropriate output of a Texture Coordinate node to the mapping node, because it has all of the transforms necessary for scaling.

If you don't want to use a mapping node, you have two alternatives:

  1. Use a vector math node to perform the scaling, for instance:

Texture coordinates driving Vector Math node set to Scale

  1. Use a Separate XYZ node to separate out each of the 3 dimensions, use a math node on each dimension to scale, and then use a Combine XYZ to recombine the coordinates:

Texture coordinate driving separate XYZ with separate math nodes on each coordinate eventually driving a combine XYZ

Of course, in both cases you don't have to limit yourself to the obvious transform, and these techniques are often used to modify coordinates for various purposes.

Marty Fouts
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  • Yeah, I'm aware of this. I am actually talking about doing the operation on a already completely texture/shader, like transform input shaders in other software, or scaling (geometry): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaling_(geometry). Essentially transforming the 3D space of an already completed shader chain. Some shaders are getting hard to work with when doing Texture Coordinate modulation, as in the instance of one material, has 148 of them... It's far easier to do it once, at the end... – WASasquatch Nov 06 '21 at 18:38
  • You've rather lost me. You have to scale the texture coordinates inside the material. Once that mapping is done by the material output node there's no changing it as a texture. If you want to scale the object, then you do that. Perhaps you need to scale your UV maps? – Marty Fouts Nov 07 '21 at 00:00
  • You can change it as a texture, as a texture can be supplied as a input, which is already altered via texture coordinates, and then it itself is used as texture coordinates. There must be a way to take the points of a texture and scale them as dilation. It's just not as simple as multiplying, as that would just multiply the noise values. – WASasquatch Nov 08 '21 at 19:50