In Depth Look at the Color Ramp Node in Blender!

the color ramp is my favorite note and i use it all the time when creating materials in this video i want to go through all of its features and give you some tips and tricks for using it let's get started the essential parts of the color ramp node are the gradient in the middle and the factor slider on the bottom the node has a color output which we can visualize by plugging it into this emission shader as you can see the color ramp now outputs a gray value onto this plane this changes when i use this factor slider the higher i set the factor the brighter it becomes this is based on the gradient we have up here i can demonstrate this by changing one color to another now the higher i set the factor the more orange the output becomes it is possible to add more colors to this gradient to do so press this little plus icon or simply hold down ctrl and left click anywhere on the gradient using a color ramp just like this isn't really useful however in almost all practical use cases you're going to use a texture to drive the factor of the color ramp to demonstrate this i am going to use a gradient texture as the name suggests this creates a perfect gradient from black to white black represents a value of 0 and white a value of 1. when i plug this texture into the color ramp you can see that this maps are gradient onto the plane for the input we can use any texture we want next i want to explain the two values in the middle of the color ramp the first one is simply there to switch between the different color stops this can be useful if they are really close to each other and it becomes hard to select the right one then you can simply click through them the second value is there to define the position of the individual stops you can use this if you want to set the stop to a certain value it is also useful to animate the position of the stops to do so right click on the value and insert a keyframe then proceed a few frames do the change you want to make and add another keyframe now the color app is animated it is also possible to animate the color of the individual stops to do so right click on this color field and insert a keyframe then go to the end change the color and insert another keyframe now the color is also changing with the animation to remove a stop from the ramp you have to select it and press this minus button next to it you find the drop down menu with a few useful tools you can flip the color ramp distribute the stops from left distribute them evenly or reset the color ramp to its default the eyedropper is useful if you want to extract colors from an image if you want to extract multiple colors at once hover over the gradient and use the shortcut alt e now you can select as many colors as you want a very important setting is the interpolation type between the colors per default this is set to linear you can change it to cardinal or b-spline to get smoother interpolations if you want hard transitions you have to change it to constant another thing you can change is the color mode the default here is rgb this means that in order to transition between two colors it interpolates the red green and blue channel if we change this to hsv however it uses the hue saturation and value channels to interpolate between two different colors the hue of a collar can be described as a rotation around the collar wheel you can see this if you take a look at this dot while i change the hue value you can see how it rotates around the collar wheel this is why we can change the interpolation mode to clockwise or counterclockwise alternatively you can set it to always choose the further or nearer way to transition between two colors this is also how you can bring the full hue spectrum into the color ramp to do so set both colors to the same values and change the interpolation mode to far now we have the full color spectrum in our gradient hsl is almost the same as hsv if you want to know what exactly the difference between those two color modes is you can watch the video i linked in the description the color ramp also supports transparency to use it change the alpha value of the desired color to access the alpha values you need to use the alpha mask output of the color ramp you can use this to mix the emission shader with a transparent bsdf node use the alpha mask as the factor and the transparency works that are basically all the features of the color ramp you need to know but i have two more bonus tips for you when you edit the color in blender you are limited to values between 0 and 1. you can get around this however by typing in the value now you can get values higher than 1. this can be useful in some specific cases for example when you have an emissive material and you want one color to shine brighter than the other another thing i like to do is to stretch the collar ramp as wide as possible allows me to make much more precise adjustments of the stops that's it for this video if you are interested i can make similar videos about other notes in the future please let me know in the comments if you would like to see that thank you for watching see you in the next one

Channel: Nik Kottmann

Views: 13,060

Keywords: Blender daily, blender, blender 3d, tutorial, blender.daily, tips, 3d, how to, In Depth Look at the Color Ramp Node in Blender!, color ramp, color ramp blender, color ramp node, how to use color ramp, color gradient blender, interpolation mode, color mode, transparency, alpha, tricks, explained, features, all features, animate color ramp, hsv, hsl, hsv color ramp, eyedropper, select color, color, gradient, texture, input, output, how to use, blender tutorial, beginner, node, procedural, change, rgb

Id: 3K3wPVifhz8

Length: 10min 48sec (648 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020