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Random Leaf Material


Dave Buckley
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I have a scene with some Onyx trees. I am at the stage of texturing. What i want to be able to do is create a realistic leaf texture, then assign this randomly to all of the leaves, with differences in hue etc. The result needs to be variation across all leaves.

 

What would be my best way to do this? I have been looking at the new multi map shader in MR but not really too sure what i'm doing.

 

Could anybody guide me through the process, preferably without using plugins/scripts although you may be ableto to twist my arm should anyone have something that does what i want at the click of a button

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yep, seen that, however, after working for a reseller for a couple of years, i also understand how much smoke and mirrors go into these demos :)

 

to be fair, i'm sure i'll be able to decipher it and then use other knowledge with it. theres actually a pretty good leaf texturing tutorial in the latest issue of 3d world, well its actually an arch viz tutorial but theres a good leaf part. shame they are always for vray though. What is the MR equivalent of the vray 2 sided material

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MultiTexture Map is a plugin for 3dsmax that loads multiple textures and assigns them randomly, either by object or by material ID. With controls to randomly adjust the gamma, hue and saturation.

 

http://www.cg-source.com/multitexture.php

 

I've used it for other purposes before but I bet you could use it on your trees too. It's free you just have to create an account on the site.

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ok so i've got my trees, they are all individual objects (not grouped or anything, not proxied) just created in onyx and then merged into my max scene. i know this isn't ideal but my pc is handling it so far.

 

so if they are all individual objects, for example scene explorer says

 

Onyx01

Onyx02 all the way to Onyx40

 

how do i apply the material to all of them randomly?

 

Do i just select all of them and then hit apply?

 

Do i need to assign random object ID's first? i guess not as there is a random option in the multi sub map (mental ray one not the plugin, although i'll take a look at that so thanks)

 

I also watched the video again matt. and in the tree example at the end, there appears to be some maps already being used in the material, not too sure what these are. are they all just copies of one material?

 

i'm still non the wiser really

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they are the same leaf map with colour corrections applied. multimap wont automatically colour correct your texture map - you still need to set up the variations. and yes, you will need each tree to have an object ID relating to which map variation you want (so 6 map variations would need randomised object ID's between 1 and 6..).

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yeh sorry my last post made me sound a bit simple.

 

it was late, i'd been working on it a while :)

 

the random method works fine also, however i think i will need to use the object id's so that i can separate trunks/leaves

 

again might sound simple but to colour correct the maps i guess i do this in photoshop or similar?

 

also i want to do it as realistic as possible so perhaps with sss so i guess i setup one leaf material i can duplicate this into the multi map slots 1-6 for example, then in each one i'd need to drop in a different colour corrected version of the map

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There's a guy that wrote a random material shader for MR called "Reptile Variation" but its not currently available. He started making some of his shaders available for free or by donation but not this one. I keep meaning to email him about it and haven't instead I'll type a post online, that he'll never read and is longer than the email I'd send him requesting the shader...I digress. Here's the webiste, knock yourself out (and let me know how awesomely wonderful it is).

 

http://www.minning.de/journal/normality-video-tutorial#software/reptile

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