Blender Vertex Color height blend material tutorial - Learn how to blend materials in Evee & Cycles 

For those who can't find the Vertex Color node, it has been renamed COLOR ATTRIBUTE.

I came here to learn how to blend material, I learned much more. You take your time to explain how it works and not only how we should do it, thanks a lot!

I love how you demo what each nodes function is before moving in

Mate, your HDR "spiaggia_di_mondello" is the main beach of my city in Italy LOL

If the displacement doesn't work for Blender 3 and up users, go to the materials property and click 'Settings' then 'Surface' . In that menu there's a drop down beside 'Displacement', make sure it is set to 'Displacement and Bump' 👍

that was the best tutorial on vertex painting & blending materials I've ever watched - fantastic

Wow...just wow. I've probably watched a few hundred Blender tutorials. Pedagogically speaking, this is perhaps the finest I've seen. Thank you for taking the time to explain the context of these techniques relative to the larger Blender ecospace. Not only did I learn the specific techniques I sought, but I came away with a much better understanding of Blender's high-level structure (e.g. the integration of workspaces). I'm bookmarking this one!!!

This tutorial is much more than just material blending. This is gold. Thank you.

Your tutorial is really useful and easy to learn. Keep with the good work!

Somehow, just clicking the "Like" button is enough. This excellent tutorial is jam packed with useful info. Thank you so much!

This is what a great tutorial looks like. When I started learning UE I was really amazed by its landscape material blending feature. I wished if blender could also do that but couldn't find anything. Instead I came across a 'Texture Tiling' tutorial from Andrew Price where he showed Poliigon PBR Mixer Node which also did similar function but there was no much of a control like this setup. You are a wonderful teacher and thank you so much for sharing all that knowledge. Subbed you.

This is exactly what I was looking for. I spent many hours yesterday looking for exactly this, but didn't know the correct search terms. Luckily this tutorial appeared to me today. And what a tutorial it is 👍 Incredibly professional and clear. Big thanks!

You are gorgeous, Loving how detail and caring you go with the lesson! Highly appreciate this kind of content on youtube!!

I enjoyed your tutorial Simon. For those that want to use materials from Megascan , just be aware that those are not free to use out side Unreal. There are free materials, they can be used lagally in Blender. as far as I know

Lifesaver!!!!! Thanks so much for this awesome tutorial. A solution like this should come with blender from the start.

Thank you so much! Spent the whole day experimenting with different tutorials. At last, yours turned out to be the best one.

I thought i recognized your voice from the Military Radio Tutorial :) Glad you made the switch to Blender.

god of 3d , i learn everything i know from your content . thank you

This is the best thing that has happened to me in a while. You are a genius! thank you! much love!

How long have I been looking for a good tutorial on this topic ... Thank you very much!

I don't know why I didn't see this, I really wanted to do mapping the right way, been learning that recently but this was so good. The possibilities are endless. I've always wanted to achieve this realism on Blender before trying it on UE5. Thank you Simon.

Its nice to see, how more and more pros from the game industry discover Blender for their workflow. First Emiel Sleegers with his game enviroment tutorials and now Simon too. i´m curious when Simon bring a full modeling tutorial with Blender.

This is like finding some great hidden loot in a game. So much excitement. Thank you, very valuable information.

What a great tutorial, there is little content on height blending like this and i greatly appreciate all the work you put into this video. Keep up the great work, looking foward to more!

I love this. I have a question. I'm trying to see if there is a way to make a clown mask, either painted with vertex color by hand or any other means and use that to drive x number of different materials. So rather than driving the vertex color mask by R, G or B it would use a clown mask that are any particular colors you painted. Then you could have materials like clean gold, patina iron, wood etc however many you want that matches up to the number of colors in the clown mask and get a similar result to this. I'm basically trying to recreate smart materials in Substance Painter and have an easy drag and drop type workflow. So you do a quick sculpt and paint vertex colors to define the material breakup and throw this material blend on there and add the appropriate materials. I haven't seen any addons that do this easily. Way too many steps. If I knew how to make this type of thing I'd save it in my startup file to have each session I want to do rapid prototype sculpts. This is a huge piece of the puzzle for me to get this started. Thanks so much for this tutorial.

this is such a good tutorial i was just wondering how could i aproach this , thank you so much for sharing your knowledge

Concise, professional, master

Amazing process. Informative.

Simon Fuchs with Blender Yeah!!! Great tuto. I love the radio tutorial and I used Blender for modeling the radio of course.

Is there a way to create a vertex blend material with 3 different textures? I'm doing some experimenting but nothing is really working or I lose some control.

Great tutorial. Not sure if it's my headphones but the audio sounds really bass heavy?

A small workflow speed up: Export the materials from bridge to Blender, then group them, then CTRL V&P them in the new Blend material. Avoids changing all the tex.s seperately. Thanks a lot for your tutorial, super cool stuff! One question though (hoping that you find the time), where did you find the math for the displacement mix? Cheers, Johannes

This video is invaluable. Ive learned a ton and im only 10 minutes in. Ive been texturing by using control + shift + T when applying quixel textures and by importing them im getting a way more dynamic node set up! Thanks !

Dude! This is crazy thank you so much

2:06 - you can just subdivide your object couple times, it would be faster than adding edge loops :) to subdivide, select your object in edit mode then right click and click subdivide. This is just a tip for begginer users

I looked this likely decade after see jama lesson.. Hugee thanks to you

finally, I understood the use of Ambient occlusion

Excellent tutorial. This is similar to unreal engines VRT technique. Awesome!

Thank you very much - this took me to the next level with Blender

Ty for this wonderful toturial 😀👌

Most detailed video I have ever seen, excited to see more videos of yours. Great Job.

thank you very much for sharing this knowledge! Very helpful :)

Amazing stuff Simon! Do you plan to make blender modeling tutorial just like for max and maya?

what a great tutorial, so much usefull intro about nodes and everything. thank you!

I don't get a result after setting up the node group and connecting it to the color-ramp (and to the other nodes) like you did. My texture just turns pink. Any idea? :)

Great tutorial, very useful. I really like how you use the maths nodes!

This was awesome, completely comprehensive and thoughtfully explained. Thank you so much

Thank you soo much for this! Huge fan of your handgun tutorial! It gave me a lot of insight into modeling and texturing, would love to see a course on the same using blender :)

really useful but how would i go about adding a 3rd texture to the mix?

excellent tutorial for beginners, thank you for explaining everything so clearly

Very helpful video Simon, thanks a lot. Also, it's great to see pro's making content for blender.

Can you acheive the same result with black and white texture mask?? Is there a pros and cons between the two method?

Once upon a time I always did this by using texture painting to create greyscale material blending masks, this vertex color method is 1000x better, though.

Thank you, these may be simple and little things but your precision for small details is impressive. One tip for better tuts - would be nice if you zoomed to nodes closer :)

This was enormously helpful. Thank you.

Thank you very much! This is what im looking for..gonna use this on my archviz project

Really great tutorial! Loving this!

Super great tutorial/workflow. Just bought your files on Gumroad. Thank you! #blender #3dmaterials #blendmaterials

Simon, thank you for this excellent tutorial. And thank you for providing the shader setup on your Gumroad account.

You're an amazing teacher! Thanks a lot!

26:45 you can press ctrl shift click to preview a shader node too, that even deletes the viewer node

This is so incredibly helpful. Thank you.

How would I use more than two materials? Is that possible?

Thank you for this Simon, very helpfull!

Such a great tutorial! Thank you for being so detailed!

Was looking for something like this forever. Thanks so much

Thank you very much for this.

You are amazing! Thank you!

What keystroke software you are using?

Excellent tutorial, thank you!

I don't understand, why not to paint with black&white and without separating colors node - I've just tried, works good!

thanks for the breakdown. You are a legend. What if for instance, i were to have one displacement what node setup would I have?

Always excited when I see new stuff! This is going to come in very handy in the future, thank you for making this free tutorial, Simon! :)

@Simon Fuchs When you are duplicating the nodes you can use Shift-D instead of copying and pasting - Save you a few clicks...

Thanks dude! That what was i looking for

Thank you so much for this tutorial, quality and efficacity.

Amazing, Thank you

Great tutorial! One of the best I've seen lately... I wonder.... is it possible to duplicate data from vertex colour to vertex group? What I mean, as we are painting with vertex colours we can know that material is showing up / hiding away. If we'd like to connect it with hair particles system for grass distribution - is there any way to make it to be connected one to the other? We are exposing bare groud, so grass particles are showing up, we are exposing sand - grass is hiding away... ?

Definitely got a new subscriber! This is incredible!

Wow... Great great content

This is absurdly useful !

Finally i got a great video in my recommendation. it's awesome tq brother.. u earned a sub ❤️❤️

Simon nice video! I have a question: Can I combine more than 3 materials too, applying the same process that you showed in the video ?. Thanks.

Great tutorial! I learned much more than what I originally came here for. One important question though... when I complete the group node and connect as instructed, my object plane goes pink. I've match the group nodes as well as the shader nodes, which up until this point was working fine with the vertex paint portion. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Super Helpful! Thank you :)

very good tutorial, did you know if you choos Grid instead of plane, it allready is subdivided. less clicks:)

Really helpful as always mate :)

Vertex color is now called Color Attributes I don't know if it helps anyone but when I started with Blender I was always confused when something in the tutorial didn't match with what I had.

I followed along with your tutorial and everything went fine. I downloaded your Shader blend and cannot get any 'height' on the plane. It's subdivided / has a displacement modifier / I'm in Cycles and Bump and displacement has been selected in Materials. I've also played with the settings in your Displacement 'box'. I can see the material but the plane remains flat. All the correct materials are loaded into the correct boxes and all apart from Albedo are set to 'No color' - Driving me crazy. Any thoughts? I've heard that there might be a problem loading displacement from Bridge?

If you were to scale up your plane 10x.. what adjustments would you need to make to prevent hard tiling seams?

Vertex Color node is COLOR ATTRIBUTE and separate RGB is separate color

very nice tutorial, thank you. However I wish there was a blend plug in like this one Megascan/Quixel has for Unreal Engine because working with nodes is not the easiest thing and also it is so time consuming

Hello, excuse me I am a beginner and I tried to cycle the project. And in rendering it doesn't work at all, maybe I'm not doing the right things. Do you have an idea ? I tried with yours, and the same ... Thanks for the answer.

Great video ! Now how do you convert this into a mesh with real displacement (not procedural) so it can be exported to Unreal Engine ?

Great Tutorial, only issue I have, is I can't plug the displacement (or any image texture) into the 'heightmap' node on the group, it breaks the shader and goes pink. Tried with a Checker texture out of curiosity, that works fine, just won't take an image texture, Maybe its an issue with Blender 2.91. Anyone else had this issue?

For newbies like me at: 15.44 the "Vertex Color" node is now rename as "Color Attribute" node . . . how to loose 15mn

hi and thank you for the great tut - was wondering, if i need to use displacement of both materials im blending, how would I do that?

..fairly simple stuff.. I see.. Thank you Simon. ((Subscribed))

I don't understand the idea behind the connections within the node group and why do you use the displacement map direct from the First map. Can you explain more About It ? Thank you

thank you. Can I paint one material on several objects with different materials?