Instanced materials

[riggles]

Revisiting instanced materials briefly. With MODO instanced materials, you can still override individual channels with unique values while retaining all the other values from the instance source — it's shown by the indicator color of the channel. With Octane materials, making a change to any channel in either the source or the instance applies the change to both. I wish instanced Octane materials behaved like the native MODO instances.

[face_off]

The current workflow is intended. If each node for an Octane material was instanced, then when you change a node connection in the instance source - that changed connection would not occur on the instance. At the moment the Octane Override item is instanced - but all the nodes are shared between the two materials - so changing one will change the other. This is mentioned at http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Modo/?page_id=839.

Paul

[riggles]

The manual doesn't say that as clearly as you did just now, so thanks for the explanation.

Having the behavior of MODO is quite handy. It allows you use the the same material for multiple meshes that share most all surface properties. Like the car shot I'm working on now. I could apply one material, and then just override the base color in each material instance. That way if I need to tweak some other part like roughness or falloff, I only need to do it once. Is there a way Octane plugin could do this in the future? I know MODO materials store setting differently since they're not nodes, but isn't that what the different channel states are for? Not sure.

[face_off]

Having the behavior of MODO is quite handy. It allows you use the the same material for multiple meshes that share most all surface properties. Like the car shot I'm working on now. I could apply one material, and then just override the base color in each material instance. That way if I need to tweak some other part like roughness or falloff, I only need to do it once. Is there a way Octane plugin could do this in the future? I know MODO materials store setting differently since they're not nodes, but isn't that what the different channel states are for?

This would only work if each node plugged into an Octane material was an instance of the source Octane material - and then changing the node structure of the source material would break all the instanced material. It would be interesting to see how Modo 801 handles this with there own material nodes. I will check once I get some of these other fixes/changes out of the way.

Paul