Materials system layered?

[treddie]

So, does (or will) Octane support multiple layers for materials?

[radiance]

No it does not...

Octane is desinged to let you edit materials in realtime instead of rendering hundreds of images and then mixing them into a biased Image... Its just a more modern pipeline and it worka great if you modify the way you work.

Radiance

[treddie]

I'm sorry. What I mean is, (and I wish I could name the program as an example, but my post was denied last time I tried that), there is at least one un-biased renderer out there that allows you to "layer" your materials...For instance, red car paint on the bottom layer, a clear coat over that, with maybe some oxidized yellowing over that. The result is a very realistic texture that has a very real depth feel to it.

[bepeg4d]

there isn't a layered materials like in waxwell but you can mix many single materials node in a very similar way, so is possible to build really complex materials like carpaint and so on
ciao beppe

[treddie]

Cool! Basically then, it sounds like the same thing (?), since in essence, nodes are kind of "layered" anyway...nodes further up feed into a node, which passes that info to nodes further down.

[bepeg4d]

exactly, there is a special node called "mix material node". you can mix toghether two different material node via slider or use an image as a mask; then you can connect the mix node to another one and so on
ciao beppe

[treddie]

Excellent! Thanks for the info. Octane just looks more amazing the more I check it out. If I can mix (layer) materials and get the speed via the GPU, then that "other" unbiased renderer might have to take a back seat.

One extra question...Is there a comprehensive node reference written yet that does a good job of saying which nodes can connect to which?

[t_3]

One extra question...Is there a comprehensive node reference written yet that does a good job of saying which nodes can connect to which?

basically you can see it from the colors of the pins:
light blue/pink/yellow are values (bool, float, int)
brown are materials
green are textures
blue are emissions
grey is medium
and so on;

these above are already the most used ones; quite a lot of them like
cameras, distributions, environments, imagers and kernels
do only connect to a rendertarget node,

transforms go into the respective pins in procedurals and phase function is for medium only.

if you click on the dropdown box on the top right of every node, you will also see what other types are available (in the right hand pane, so called "node editor")...

[treddie]

Geez, I'm getting excited. You're all bending my arm...Turning me into a potential NextLimit turncoat!

[t_3]

Geez, I'm getting excited. You're all bending my arm...Turning me into a potential NextLimit turncoat!

i bet you will get the real flow with octane pretty soon