Page 1 of 2

layering nodes etc

Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2020 5:53 pm
by mitchino
I want to create a gold material with roughness, and then have a plaid/tartan pattern on top, where I can independently control the two effects. I have a tartan pattern from shutterstock on a white background.

If I was doing this in photoshop I'd just set the tartan to multiply and adjust opacity. I'm wondering how to do it in Octane. I believe the latest version of Octane has new compositing nodes that can mimic the photoshop behaviour - can anyone give me an idea of how to set this up?

Re: layering nodes etc

Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2020 6:10 pm
by ndreimi
A quick Mix Material should be able to achieve this. Make your rough gold material, and then make another material of what you want your top texture to be. Add a mix material, and link both materials to it. Then use your pattern in the mix node.


http://www.aoktar.com/octane/OCTANE%20H ... erial.html

Re: layering nodes etc

Posted: Fri Dec 25, 2020 8:25 am
by mitchino
Thanks for replying but that's not what I'm after - the plaid pattern has different colours in it and I need it to be layered over the rough gold but retain it's different shades. If I use it as a mask or in the mix node it will lose that subtlety.

Re: layering nodes etc

Posted: Fri Dec 25, 2020 8:34 am
by aoktar
Material layer may be what you look for, tried it?

Re: layering nodes etc

Posted: Fri Dec 25, 2020 7:14 pm
by AWOLism
Mitchino, if you are referring to a Photoshop layers style blending of images, that will be available in Octane 2020.2, I was just playing around with the 2020.2-RC5 (Release candicate) from 23.12.2020 today, and there is a Utility Node called Composite Texture. I'm really looking forward to that in a production ready stable release.

That will surely make everyones node editing lives easier. (I do hope there will be simpler layer reordering available down the line as well.)

Re: layering nodes etc

Posted: Sat Dec 26, 2020 11:03 am
by mitchino
That's what I was thinking of - I'll download the release candidate and give it a shot.

Re: layering nodes etc

Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2020 10:31 am
by mitchino
So I've installed 2020.2 RC5 and I have access to new nodes including composite texture. How do I use it? I thought I would see a drop down menu in the node with Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft Light etc etc?

Just don't understand what this node is supposed to do?

Re: layering nodes etc

Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2020 11:46 am
by aoktar
mitchino wrote:So I've installed 2020.2 RC5 and I have access to new nodes including composite texture. How do I use it? I thought I would see a drop down menu in the node with Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft Light etc etc?

Just don't understand what this node is supposed to do?
All here, what are you looking for more?

Re: layering nodes etc

Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2020 1:19 pm
by AWOLism
mitchino wrote:So I've installed 2020.2 RC5 and I have access to new nodes including composite texture. How do I use it? I thought I would see a drop down menu in the node with Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft Light etc etc?

Just don't understand what this node is supposed to do?
I'm attaching a test file with a super simple example of a checker pattern layer on top of a simple color layer.
The dropdown menus with different blend modes have for me somewhat confusing defaults in the C4D Octane plugin, so I checked out the Standalone RC5, which had more predictable default settings. Those are in the "Composite Texture Octane Standalone Defaults" material.
All that will surely be made more clear when we have documentation for all the options, but with the settings from Standalone you can use the opacity slider and Blend Mode dropdown as you would in Photoshop.

Re: layering nodes etc

Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2020 1:27 pm
by AWOLism
Oh, by the way, Aoktar, I asked this in the "Development Build Releases" forum as well, as I thought maybe it is a question for the core development team, but I guess I can ask you too:
Would it be possible to add an easy way of reordering the layers, perhaps like a "move up"/"move down" command for each layer, and also a way to remove a layer in the middle of the stack? Right now one can only remove the top layer.