Crowd Agents and Octane

[chanson78]

Hello,

I have multiple Agent nodes connected to a Merge node to a Crowdsource node. Is there a way to use Octane materials to texture the individual Agents? I understand that you can use the Octane Random Shader but only with Instances.

[juanjgon]

Hi,

I'm afraid that currently, without support for custom attributes, it is going to be hard to use a single Octane material to shade the agents with multiple textures or materials. As you say, the instances can use the RandomColor node, or even now in the latest plugin build, the Cd attribute, but this feature is only available for the instances or particles.

The workaround is to apply an Octane material to each agent type, but I suppose that this is not a great solution.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[juanjgon]

There are some tricks to use custom attributes with Octane while waiting for the proper feature, but I'm not sure if this tricks could be useful in your case:

https://vimeo.com/172594655

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[chanson78]

The workaround is to apply an Octane material to each agent type, but I suppose that this is not a great solution.

This could be a solution possibly for me, at what level would I apply the octane material? Right now I have six agents into a merge node and then into a crowdsource node.

[juanjgon]

You could try to add the material at SOP level using the Material SOP before the merge node.

-Juanjo