Lee Fraser shows how you can drive the combination of two images in Maya using an operator or factor value in the Color Composite Node.

One node that doesn’t get talked about too much is Maya’s Color Composite Node. While there are a lot of ways that you can mix shaders, textures, and other things in Maya, color composite lets you control the composite over two images. Check out this new tutorial showing how you can use it to vary the look of water mixing two BOSS displacement maps. 

How colorComposite Works

The color composite node is part of Maya’s lookdev shading nodes. It allows you to drive the combination of two images with an operator or factor value. Fraser shows how you can drive two images using Maya’s 3D Paint tool to define the area masks. “In this video, we’ll use the output of the 3d paint tool as the factor value to show the differences between two BOSS displacement maps.”

Lee Fraser is a Sr. Technical Specialist for Autodesk specializing in 3d workflows in entertainment.