[Help] - "Mixer" patch type usage for RGB masking

[manuelgonzalvez]

Good afternoon. i'm behind the idea of a RGB mask based mixer. I have a working patch in wire, that takes 4 inputs ( 3 sources and a control texture) and masks layer 1 with the control´s Red, layer 2 with control's Green, and layer 3 with control's Blue. It then performs an additive mix of the 3 inputs.

I have this working on wire, but i'm trying to make it a compiled patch that can be used as a Blend mode.

i tried splitting the patch in 3 different ones ( something like "onlyRed", "onlyGreen", and "onlyBlue", so as to mask from a 4th control layer with that criteria) but cannot find the way to make it able to select a certain input layer (aside from a spout input) , nor select the self layer's texture as source.

Any help on this? thanks!

[Zoltán]

If you use the patch in Arena as Effect, you get one Texture input.
Used as Mixer, you get two.
You can split the texture input into it's channels using the Unpack node.

You can embed video files and images into your patch, just drop them to the patch background in Wire.
Those could be used as built in masks.

[najork]

To have one layer masking 3 separate layers with it's various channels, I think simplest solution might be layer routers in the comp.

You could make a mixer in wire with a control to select some combo of RGB as the mask (unlike just luma with the built-in mask modes). Controlling the channels that way, rather than with effects, leaves the source RGB clean so it can be routed to other layers.

I'm picturing this...

Group 1:
L1) control image
L2) image layer1

Group 2:
L3) router, set to L1
L4) image layer2

Group 3:
L5) router, set to L1
L6) image layer3