Hi there. I’m a newbie to 3d sculpting and I’m trying to get my head around the differences between alphas, stamps and textures. Are they all similar? For example, is a screw head alpha a stamp or an alpha? Is a skin alpha a texture or an alpha?
I found a few alphas online and I’ve put them all in alphas folder but now I’m wondering if some of them go into textures or stamps.
Alphas modulates the painting and the sculpting. Black is 0 intensity and white is full intensity.
So it’s always a black and white image.
If it’s a RGBA image, sometimes the app will take the A channel (the opacity/alpha channel instead, thus the name « alpha »)
Textures are colored images, they will paint the surface.
If the textures is RGBA, Nomad will use the A channel to modulate the painting as well (so you can say this texture also acts as an alpha for the painting).
That is a normal map. It’s purpose is to fake detail in lighting by changing the normal of the surface.
Like suppose I want to make a road and want to add the bumps on the road. You could sculpt each bump on the road or use a normal map to fake bumps.
Thanks for that. I think I understand now. So alphas are global amongst textures, stamps and painting?
I was just looking at some PBR materials on the net and it comes with a bunch of files (roughness, metalness, height, normal, etc) So if I wanted to do like a PBR material I would just select the height alpha from the file and discard the rest, a colour from the pallet and a coloured texture then adjust the metalness and roughness on the slider for the same effect?
Thank you.
I updated the FAQ on this subject, you can read the part on painting.
Thank you for your help.
