Material Blender

Sometimes a material uber shader is not enough for effects that ultimately require the overlaying of several materials, like dirt or extra reflection layers for example. To achieve this efficiently with Redshift, you should use the Material Blender shader.

The Material Blender supports up to six 'coat' layers on top a base material shader. Since it is important to preserve energy for 'realistic' materials ( meaning, a material cannot reflect more light than it receives), by default layers are not simply added together, they are instead mixed based on the color of each successive layer.

The default mixing rule is such that a layer blend color of 1.0, 1.0, 1.0 (white) results in the layer material color winning, effectively replacing the previous layers, whereas a layer blend color of 0.0, 0.0, 0.0 (black) results in the previous layers winning, with no contribution from the layer material. Layer blend colors in-between black and white result in a blend of the previous layers and the layer material.