Common Modifier Options

Some options are commonly used by many modifiers, and share the same behavior across all of those. In particular, many offer ways to precisely mask and weight their effect on a vertex basis (using either vertex groups and/or textures).

Vertex Group

Vertex Groups are an easy way to control which vertices are affected by a modifier, and to which extent (using their weights). They are available when modifying meshes or lattices.

Tip

Vertex groups can also be edited and even animated using the Vertex Weight modifiers.

Vertex Group

The vertex group name.

Warning

The group is referenced by its name. That means that if you rename it, the link to the renamed vertex group will be lost by all modifiers using it (their field will turn red), and you’ll have to select the proper group again in all of them.

Invert <->

Inverts the influence of the selected vertex group, meaning that the group now represents vertices that will not be deformed by the modifier.

The setting reverses the weight values of the group. Only available in some modifiers.

Texture

Those options allow to use any kind of image (including parametric ones) to control the modifier’s effect. Most of the time, only the value (grayscale) of the texture is used, but in some cases (like with some modes of the Displace modifier), the whole RGB color components might be exploited.

Tip

Textures can be animated (either using videos, or by animating the mapping coordinates…).

Texture

The texture data-block to use.

Tip

By clicking on the right-most button of this field (with the settings icon), you can go directly to the selected texture’s settings in the Texture Properties tab.

Texture Coordinates

The texture’s coordinates to get each vertex’ value:

UV

Take texture coordinates from face UV coordinates.

UV Map: The UV Map from which to take texture coordinates. If the object has no UV coordinates, it falls back to the Local coordinate system. If this field is blank, but there is a UV map available (e.g. just after adding the first UV map to the mesh), the currently active UV map will be used.

Note

Since UV coordinates are specified per face, the UV texture coordinate system currently determines the UV coordinate for each vertex from the first face encountered which uses that vertex. Any other faces using that vertex are ignored.

This may lead to artifacts if the mesh has non-contiguous UV coordinates.

Object

Take the texture coordinates from another object’s coordinate system.

Object

The object from which to take texture coordinates. Moving the object will therefore alter the coordinates of the texture mapping.

If this field is blank, it falls back to the Local coordinate system.

Note

Moving the original object will also result in a texture coordinate update. As such, if you need to maintain a displacement coordinate system while moving the modified object, consider parenting the coordinate object to the modified object.

Global

Take the texture coordinates from the global coordinate system.

Local

Take the texture coordinates from the object’s local coordinate system.

Use Channel

Which channel to use as value source (only available with a few modifiers currently, others follow the Intensity behavior, unless otherwise specified).

Intensity: The average of the RGB channels (if RGB(1.0, 0.0, 0.0) value is 0.33).
Red/Green/Blue/Alpha: One of the color channels’ values.
Hue: The hue from the HSV color space (i.e; the color in the standard wheel, e.g. blue has a higher hue value than yellow).
Saturation: The saturation from the HSV color space (e.g. the value for pure red is 1.0, for gray is 0.0).
Value: The value from the HSV color space.

Note

All of the channels above are gamma corrected, except for Intensity.