All language subtitles for 06-Distortion

Now we can add some variation
on the individual brick level.

So let's distort the bricks, to
make them a bit more interesting.

Let's make some space after the size
scaling, where we have our aspect corrected

brick coordinates. We know that with a vector
addition we can move our coordinates around,

so what we can do here, is use a
Noise Texture to control how much

we move each point on the surface,
creating some nice distortion.

Let's set it to 2D, to save on
that unnecessary Z computation.

This node is similar to the White Noise, and has
the same outputs, but unlike the White Noise,

it creates a continuous noise. And just like the
White Noise, we see that it generated a distinct

pattern for each channel, but again, the Factor
output has the same pattern as the Red channel.

Now we can plug this Color into the Vector, as
colors and vectors are effectively the same.

If we just plug this into the addition, the
amount of displacement is clearly too extreme,

making our bricks almost completely disappear.
If we use a Scale operation, to multiply every

channel in the vector by a single value, we
can bring it down to a more reasonable amount.

But we can see that changing the magnitude
of the noise displaces the bricks diagonally.

That's because the noise values are between
zero and one, and thus they all offset the

coordinates either in the positive or the negative
direction, depending on the sign of the scaling.

We want the distortion to go in all directions,

so let's subtract 0.5 to center the values around
zero, turning the new range into -0.5 to 0.5.

Now, no matter the amount of
noise, the bricks stay put.

This is nice and all, but every brick has the same
exact shape, which is probably not what we want.

This is because we are feeding the same
vector as input to the Noise, for every brick.

But for this very purpose, we also
computed an index for the bricks,

allowing us to offset the texture for each brick.

We can just add the index to the vector,

but then, we see that the full length brick
rows get a continuous connected noise pattern,

because as we saw before, adding the
fractioned and floored vectors together,

gives us the original coordinates. This
isn't a problem with the small rows,

because they have been scaled down,
creating a gap in their coordinates.

To break this continuity, we can simply scale the
index values up, moving the coordinates farther

apart. Now we have a separate and unique pattern
for each brick. Depending on the scale of your

texture, you might want to turn this scaling
factor up more, but be careful not to set it

too high, because all the values in Blender
are represented by floating point numbers,

and due to the way they work, they have a higher
precision at lower values than at higher values.

So if this is too high, the values can go into
a range where the steps between numbers are big

enough to be visible. As we turn this down,
we can see that it gets better and better,

but keep in mind that the farther we are from
the origin, the higher these values get, and

therefore the issue is also more visible. So try
to avoid working with unreasonably large numbers.

Now we can check out the final result. And we
see that all the bricks have a unique shape.

This distortion setup will
come in handy very often,

so let's Ctrl+G it into a group, and
connect all the necessary sockets.

We won't be using the Distortion control of the
Noise Texture, so we can leave that unconnected,

but you can always connect it as well if you need
it. The subtraction should always stay on 0.5,

so let's leave that. And the last
thing to connect is the scale,

that we use to control the intensity of the
distortion, so let's name it accordingly.

Then let's Tab out, and call the group
Distortion2D to remind ourselves that

the Noise inside is set to 2D mode, as we
can't expose that as a control on the group.

Now we can just snap the nodes into a
neat layout, and we are one step farther!