Random materials

Skatter Feature Requests
1

And one more request =) for v-ray and SketchUp.

I have a set v-ray proxy car. I changed the geometry in them to the beautiful low poly cars.

They are weigh little for SketchUp and are beautifully rendered.
I specifically made that they had the same Mat ID and in the same order sorted.

I can change their colors by changing the component’s material.
It is also possible to work not only with proxy objects, but also with any components of the SketchUp with the default material.

I expect it would be cool to add the ability to specify several materials for the scatter. So that it randomly assigns them to distributed objects. Not assigning geometry but only changing the material of the component.

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2

I’m already working on such a feature :slight_smile:

3

And as you’re working on such a feature, is it possible to:

  • have a component definition with many instances in the model;
  • that has a material (or several) with correct UV mapping applied inside (not the default material);
  • but when you click on the render button those instances get randomly replaced by temporary definitions which are copies of the first;
  • The only difference of the temporary copies is that those materials are then randomly offset, rotated or scaled?
  • Maybe those materials could also be randomly replaced by materials in a folder?
  • All governed by a seed?
4

You’re being greedy now :smiley:
What you are describing is a very specific workflow for a niche use-case. I think this should rather happen on the Render Engines side, like the Triplanar texture in Vray

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5

It didn’t hurt asking… it was a nice try though, wasn’t it?

6

Indeed!

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7

So what you’re working on, Thomas, is a feature of Skatter that

  1. randomly replaces the default material in the component by a selected set of colors (thus getting rid of the mat id issue as per in vray, 3dsmax, maya, etc.) that you define in a specific skatter parameter or

  2. randomly replaces a material with a specific UV defined (like textured material, which implies correct UV mapping / UV wrapping) by another set of textured materials, also defined by a specific skatter window

I think that 1. is way simpler as there are no UV issue involved (and could be achieved by using some already available ruby scripts), but 2. would be very powerful.

What you seemed to be working on (but I could be wrong :smiley: ) is a vertex color based color variation feature (for leaves for instance), and this would be very impressive but I can’t see how you’d do that, as it’s very render engine specific.

And there’s also the skatter id per material (be able to define skatter zones by sketchup materials, a kind of multi-sub mat alla sketchup+skatter), which would be very useful for landscaping, as we could use this to quickly define greenery species zones, as a cheap replacement the very awaited “random clusters” feature. :wink:

8

It will be close to 1.
You will have a list where you’ll be able to pick materials that exist in the model.
These materials will then be randomly applied to the Components Instances created by Skatter.
For this to work in Render Only mode, it needs to be supported by the render engines, though. I’m working on it with them.

I don’t want to mess with the content of the components, so no modifications of UVs. Because this would mean flooding the model with duplicates of component definitions.
But on the other hand, we are limited by the fact that we can’t apply the default material to a face while maintaining the UVs…

9

I know what you mean I’m always facing that UV issue. If instead of a no material sketchup would have a placeholder textured material which would use model units as reference for tiling, and could be UV mapped, it would be great.

10

How is the random material feature coming? Still in the works?

11

It is ready in Skatter, but has yet to be implemented by the render engines.

Hopefully they will have it done by the time we release Skatter V2

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