Material switching?

[seth_richardson]

Is material switch coming?

[aleksandar.kasabov]

Hello seth_richardson,

Would you mind elaborating some more on your query? What is it that you are trying to achieve? Sharing some examples would be very useful. Thank you.

[shane_mckenzie]

In Arnold or Redshift I've used this to activate tri-planar - i.e. a boole value is linked to a switch shader, 0 for non-tri-planar, 1 for tri-planar. I was looking for this node the other day in fact

[aleksandar.kasabov]

Hello shane_mckenzie,

Please note that I have added such a request (request ID: VC4D-1733) to our internal system and I will let you know if we have any updates on the matter. Thank you.

[seth_richardson]

Hello shane_mckenzie,

Please note that I have added such a request (request ID: VC4D-1733) to our internal system and I will let you know if we have any updates on the matter. Thank you.

Sorry for the long reply here. Shader switch is present in the max version of Vray I believe. But its very useful to control alot of different color options or material types my usage in C4D is generally using user data as an integer to directly drive the int value of the shader switch node in redshift for example.

Example:
1. I put a redshift Object tag on the root null of my object.
2. Create a userdata using an int list, then I set it as a driver then go back to my redshift object tag and have it drive the Object ID. 0 could be black and 1 could be red for example.
3. Then for my shader I will create Redshift integer User data node and a Shader switch node, in the User data node I connect the attribute name to RSObjectID so now when I change my user data it swap the material being used based on object ID.

This is more of a work around to be honest, since they moved away from xpresso for nodes I have to use RSObjectID instead of just directly dropping my Int UserData into an xpresso shader node and controlling it that way. But I assume since Vray is also using the new nodes theres no real way to access userdata cleanly in the way I am doing it.

Long story short I often render 1 product but with any number of variations in texture and color so this has been the way I control those swaps. I could use takes but in my experience theres alot of ways where that can get messed up and is just cumbersome compared my simple user data shader switching.

[aleksandar.kasabov]

Hello seth_richardson,

Thank you for your extensive feedback.

As mentioned in my previous post, I have already added such a request, and our developers will look into it. Your feedback will be linked to the request so we can take it into consideration. I will let you know once we have any additional information to share. Thank you.

[seth_richardson]

A quick update on this the blend material does what I want. However there is a big difference between the node version of the blend material (what I want to use) and the standard vray blend material.

When you expose the standard vray blend material in xpresso you can successfully control it with user data and iterate through all the materials in the scene with a material iterator plugged into the object input of the blend material.

However the node version of this for whatever reason is lacking the object input in xpresso. So you are unable to iterate through all your materials that are nodal blend materials. It seems all chaosgroup has to do is make sure that's accessible in the node version and it should be problem solved for the most part.