The Secret of Lookup

I am poking at some samples which ThreeDee has graciously posted in this thread and I just don't fully understand what Lookup is doing and what data it is passing. I am trying to get one Lookup component, which is storing the results of a Smudge operation with scale abd rotation etc and use that data to scale, rotate and smudge a second object so that I can blend with the results of the first -basically multiple types of buildings generated by seperate Smudge operations but I want to avoid using several Smudge components.

I have played with the examples and even think I understand but then the implmentation is wrong so I really don't understand what is going on. After the Smudge is fed into Lookup what data does it contain? Does it contain all the scale, rotation and smudge information that precedes it in the chain?

I want to apply that same scale, rotation and smudge to a simple polygon to start. I assume the results from the first Lookup need to be passed into a second Lookup or other Transform component that accepts X,Y values. I tried pluggin a simple polygon into the second Lookup in each input and tried every permutation I could think of but can't seem to get it exactly right.

I then created a second Smudge chain and it works, so then I tried to remove the second Smudge component, assuming the 'chain' up to taht point was good and substitute it with a Lookup (and each of teh transform components, to pass the data from the first chains Lookup -again, never exactly right.

Anyway I'd appreciate more info on how the Lookup component works as it seems like a vital component in any significant filter construct. I can just cut and paste the existing example by ThreeDee but I need to understand it better.

Sorry for the many posts.

It does - thanks. I did some reading about mapped inputs and have a better grasp of what is going on now. I was imagining the components passing data as distinct values rather than a grayscale map ie rotation:30 scale: 33% smudge:trail:20 etc