The easiest and most intuitive way to describe the MASK GRADIENT component is in terms of the color version, which is what we'll use here. However, the same concepts apply to the percent and bump
versions.
MASK GRADIENT assigns colors based on the design or mask of a linked texture. The mask is defined
by gray scale values. You can think of this as colorizing a grayscale image by selecting which shades of gray are assigned to each color. The Shell Position 1 to 5 parameters, in conjunction with the Shell Value
1 to 5 parameters define which color gets assigned to each shade of gray. After the gray shades have been assigned to corresponding shell positions, each shade will be assigned the position's
accompanying color value. You can think of this as each shell position being equal to a certain shade of gray. Shell positions and values can number between two and five. Each transition from one color to
another is controlled with the Blend Function parameter. You can link this parameter to a Generator for the blending or go with the default, which is a simple linear blend.
When the Enable Clamps parameter is checked, each assigned color retains its order (1 to 5). In other
words, Shell Value 1 will always appear next to Shell Value 2, regardless of the value assigned to the shell positions. If , say, Shell Position 3 is given a higher value than Shell Position 4, it will be clamped so that
it retains its place. If Enable Clamps is not checked, the order of the shell values depends completely on the values given to each corresponding shell position. In other words, the positions may be switched.
