A certain percentage of the parameters used to control components in DarkTree are Regional.  A Regional parameter is really just a parameter that includes a little extra information about about what piece of the texture being modified.  For example, the Brick parameter of the Bricks component contains extra information about what brick is being colored: brick 1, brick 2, ...brick 11d7.

You can tell which parameters are Regional by looking for the Region Icon .  When you go to link a parameter up, any Regional parameters will have the Regional Icon next to them.  As you can see in Figure 1 (below), Mortar Width, Blend Function, and Brick are Regional, Mortar is not.

To take advantage of a Regional parameter's "extra information", you need to link it to a Control Class component. The Control Class of components exist to bring the quality of randomness to otherwise regular texture patterns.  In the Control Class, the Randomizer generates random values for each region, Switch randomly chooses between a number of texture subtrees for each region, and the three Shuffle components randomly rotate, scale, or translate a background for each region.

Figure2 below shows how three of the Control Class components work with the Regional Brick parameter.  The Randomizer is choosing a random color for each brick.  Shuffle Rotate is rotating it's background different amounts for each brick.  Switch is randomly choosing between two different backgrounds for each brick.

The two Generator Class components, Noise and Fractal Noise, are the only other components outside of the Control Class that can take advantage of  Regional parameters.  These two components only randomize if the parameter they are linked to are both Regional and Functional and their Vary Regions flag is set to true. Figure3 below shows the Mortar Width of Bricks hooked to a Noise Function.

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