different textures based on color

[WimOos]

I am trying to find something similar to a VrayBlendMtl. When doing complicated tile patterns that needs to work for large areas and close up shots, I normally use a VrayBlendMtl with different black and white mask maps to mix/blend different materials. This allows you to have an overall complicated pattern created by the mask maps and materials that can have detailed smaller maps on. I was wondering, instead of using different black and white masks to blend materials together, is there not a map that you can color code? So in photoshop you paint red, green and yellow, and use those colors as the mask. You will then have 1 high res colored mask map, and somehow tell max to apply materials based on a mask by color instead of mask by black and white.
Tries finding something on the internet but could not.

regards,
wim

[WimOos]

found something : you can use an RGB tint map, or the color correction map, to map R,G or B to white or black and get the mask that way. but that still gives you only 3 masks.

[Morne]

Hi Wim

How about using multitexture as a mask? In there you can load for example 10 masks and randomly change their hue/gamma etc. You can use that as a mask, or diffude or reflection or both.
You can even go further and use that inside bercontile and rondomise the patttern by flipping/rotating each tile either randomly or 90/180 etc.

Or you can use VRayMultiSubTex to randomly use masks based on face id/object id/render id/ name etc VrayMultiSubTex can be very powerful
Instead of masks, you can use VrayMultiSubTex to apply different diffues textures basded on id etc

[WimOos]

HI Morne,

yes thanks, I am doing something fairly similar in the end. it is a huge square with tiles made u of small indiv. tiles, mixed with different colors in a pattern. then that pattern gets mixed in its own pattern on a bigger scale, but the bigger scale pattern is not geometric. sO I have the small scale tiles working, I thought I will try and cut a corner with using only 1 mask for the big pattern. in the end I created a couplke of diferent big masks.
I still think it will be quite handy if you could have a mask based on a specific rgb value.

thanks!

[samuel_bubat]

I support this idea. This would be something for the Wishlist Thread. Sure there are workarounds. But I know what WimOos means. I know exactly this feature from the Arma2 Engine. You have one mask where you can define as much colors as you like. For each submaterial you define one or more RGB values and a Tolerance as mask. The Arma engine even lets you scatter plants or other objects using this map. Like this it´s very comfortable to paint landscapes with different vegetation styles, define forrests, grasland, or shorelines.