How can I mask a building so only the bricks have a normal?

[QFGlenn]

Hi. I am building a material blueprint for a building with brick walls and windows.

So far I’ve been able to mask things efficiently. Using a black and white mask texture for the metallic and specular and a oneminus sample for the roughness.

I understand this is necessary because Black (0,0,0) is 0 and White (255,255,255) is 1.

When I try the same method with the normalmap, everything seems to work except, after applying this change the normals do not appear to function correctly.

The brick normals are perfect. But the windows are all wrong. I don’t think Black means the same thing for a normal as it does for these other parameters.

So what color should I make it to effectively remove the normal from the windows? Is there a better way to do this?

[anonymous_user_733168e6]

QFglenn,

Your one minus node is kinda like the invert command in photoshop, it flips things over, so it won’t work with a normal map, as the blue will turn yellowish (due to each channel flipping).

Assuming that you are trying to layer sections of two images and have the second image, disable the normal map, you will want to make a texture that is normal map neutral (128,128,255) and then lerp it over the existing image, using your black and white image to create the alpha channel for the lerp. Think of the lerp node as the thing that allows you to stack two images and stencil out part of top image.