Keep triplanars in sync

V-Ray V-Ray for Maya Requests
1

Hi!
Thanks a lot for the addition of the triplanar node! It really helps in a lot of situations.

One question, though:
I often pull my maps for glossiness, reflection color, diffuse, bump etc. from a single bitmap input texture. I do some color corrections with the texture, pipe it through a vrayTriplanar and into the vrayMaterial. Now it happens that I have to come up with 5 or 6 triplanar nodes that need to be identical, because the textures need to stay in correlation, of course.
When I change an attr on one triplanar node I have to change it on all nodes connected to that shader. Do you think it would be possible to automate this?
First idea: Maybe integrate some sort of “triplanar ID mode”, so that the user can assign an ID to a triplanar node that then acts as a “master” and just turn the other triplanar nodes into “slaves” that pull their settings from the master by an assigned ID.
Another idea: add a bunch (like ten) of additional vector inputs and outputs to the triplanar node. Those just need to inherit the settings from the main texture input.

What do you think?

triplanar.JPG
triplanar.JPG1006×390 41.4 KB

2

you can just connect attributes from one to all of the other ones and it will drive them - why not?

3

Just because I have to do it every time. But maybe I just do that with a simple script.

4

so you setup one triplanar with connections, then duplicate - with connections to network, it will preserve those connections…

you can also script that.

5

Just if somebody is interested in this. Select your slave nodes first, then the master node and execute this script (I made a shelf button):

### Connect vray triplanar nodes ###
### Select the slave nodes first, the master node last and execute the script ###

import pymel.core as pm

mySel = pm.ls(orderedSelection=True)

myMaster = mySel[-1]
print 'Master: ' +myMaster.name()

mySlaves = []
for each in mySel[:-1]:
    if each.type() == 'VRayTriplanar':
        mySlaves.append(each)
        print 'Slave: ' +each.name()
        myMaster.scale >> each.scale
        myMaster.blend >> each.blend
        myMaster.frameOffset >> each.frameOffset
        myMaster.texRotation >> each.texRotation
        myMaster.rndMode >> each.rndMode
        myMaster.rndTexOffset >> each.rndTexOffset
        myMaster.rndTexRotation >> each.rndTexRotation
        myMaster.rndAxis >> each.rndAxis
        myMaster.rndFrameRotation >> each.rndFrameRotation
        myMaster.refSpace >> each.refSpace
        myMaster.nodeRefTransform >> each.nodeRefTransform
        myMaster.uCoord >> each.uCoord
        myMaster.vCoord >> each.vCoord

### END ###
6

Have you considered using a single triplanar texture and connect the remap nodes after it (to the outputs), not before?