@negativesanchez98 I think you’re getting it! If you’re thinking of a mask as a greyscale result that’s used to mix two different textures, you’re on the right track. The difference would be that a mask is only one of the many use cases for the Map Range node, but it is the most common, so thinking about it that way is not necessarily wrong.
Try thinking about it this way:
A texture always has a brightest and a darkest value. The difference between the two is the range. If the difference is not much, it has a small range, and if there’s a big difference it’s a big range. If you want to make the bright parts even brighter without changing the darkest values, the difference between the dark and light values will increase, and so you’re changing the range.
Let’s say the darkest value is 0 and the brightest value is 1, but you want a result where the darkest value is 0 and the brightest value is 2. Easy enough, but what exactly happens to all the values in the middle between the two? Should a value that was previously 0.5 stay at 0.5 or should it be increased in proportion? How all the in-between colors get adjusted to fit the new range is how they are mapped to the new range, hence the name Map Range.
Hope that helps!
