Item mask on group not working

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Item mask on group not working

Postby rubberchicken » Tue Jan 31, 2023 5:27 am

rubberchicken Tue Jan 31, 2023 5:27 am
I have a setup I use in modo often where I have an item with a base material assignment, then that is instanced among various mesh groups. I use the same mesh with different graphics by creating a group in the groups panel and adding specific instances to the group. Then create a shader item mask for the each group and add any override materials to those groups. In this case I have a pressure gauge that is part of a regulator. The gauge is the same for inlet and outlet, except for the graphics on the face. The gauge is also used on 9 different SKUs. So normally I would have a shader item mask for the SKU, and in that an item mask for the face material, and in that one mask for inlet group and one for outlet group. I just place the relevant face graphics into each folder and works great. It seems though that Octane does not recognise the item mask on a group. Even if I drop them down into the base material they are ignored. The material is Modo, no Octane override.

Screenshot_20230131_042521.png

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Screenshot_20230131_042233.png
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Re: Item mask on group not working

Postby rubberchicken » Wed Feb 01, 2023 2:24 pm

rubberchicken Wed Feb 01, 2023 2:24 pm
I used the instance range solution posted by Funk, and this worked, although the node setup is a pain. The gradient input only has a set number of slots, so I created a layered texture set for the outlet group and another for the inlet group. That way I only needed two particle IDs, and each layer group had nine different diffuse options. 9 SKUs with two gauges each. Eighteen diffuse options in total. Then I assigned ID 1 to the second group, not needing to change the other as they are already zero. The layer texture groups I set the opacity on each to zero by default and keyed the visibility in a pass group for each SKY. This is a problem I ran into with Vray whenever I had to use the schematic because of a blend material. One time I had multiple layer nodes cascading into each other to cover the number of variants I needed. But Octane is way more work in the schematic than Vray ever was. Even if/when I become more proficient, this is going to remain a significant disadvantage for octane in Modo. Dragging instances to a modo group to have it automatically affected by an item shader is so, so much faster and intuitive than pecking about in channels assigning meaningless numbers to instances. There's only visibility of this underlying structure if you dig into a huge noodle fest and figure out what is going on. I will have to start leaving notes in the schematic, or I will not know what I have done later.

I do love the look of Octane. I will push a few more jobs through to see how I can get used to this. But most of my projects involve creating variations like this. Shader tree cannot be beaten for that clearly.

Smoothflame-KH101-AC-SF.jpg
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Re: Item mask on group not working

Postby funk » Fri Feb 03, 2023 6:47 am

funk Fri Feb 03, 2023 6:47 am
Unfortunately the plugin doesn't support "groups tab" groups in the shader tree.

I would like to see this too
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Re: Item mask on group not working

Postby SreckoM » Mon Feb 06, 2023 10:59 am

SreckoM Mon Feb 06, 2023 10:59 am
Wanted to ask for this too. It would be great if this could be implemented.
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Re: Item mask on group not working

Postby face_off » Tue Feb 07, 2023 6:02 am

face_off Tue Feb 07, 2023 6:02 am
It is hard to determine without having access to the scene in question, but I think the core problem in this case is that the plugin only supports a single layer of Material, Selection, Part and Item mask (so you can have one of each, but not an Item Mask as a child of another Item Mask) and you have an Item Mask as a child of an Item Mask. Reliably translating this Shader Tree layout to Octane materials is almost impossible as once the scene gets more complex there quickly becomes a massive number of unique Octane materials. Octane needs an Octane material for each material id on the mesh (and that is what the plugin generates). Whereas the Modo Shader Tree allows the shading of parts of a material across different elements of the scene - they are two completely different ways of doing it. Once you incorporate Group Masks it gets even more complex!

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Re: Item mask on group not working

Postby rubberchicken » Tue Feb 07, 2023 8:01 am

rubberchicken Tue Feb 07, 2023 8:01 am
Thanks Paul. It's looking like Octane isn't ideal for most of my work. Setting these things up without the shader tree takes so long and is so cumbersome to edit.
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