Day 52



Rock_instancer improvements
Definitely don't want to use the high-poly rocks which are being called using delayed load. So here i have them go through "Polyreduce SOP" and send them out as low-poly proxy for preview purpose inside of "rock_instancer".

If there's ever changes done to the high-poly rocks, things can be updated by jumping into these networks and cache them out again.



Upgrades for my proxy preview for instance objects, was unable to fetch in cached rock_objects from disk using "Objectmerge SOP". It does make sense why it doesn't work, always use it to merge stuff that's within the hip file. Finally got it to work when Mr Ron pointed out the use of "File SOP" instead of "Objectmerge SOP" and was even kind enough to demonstrate what stamp function and stamp variable to get it going!


Before
As you can see in "Before", scale and orientation are all the same as they aren't referencing anything. Simply copying box onto the points.

"After", scale and rotation are based off the exact rocks being rendered.





After
Proxy rocks and bounding boxes can be viewed in the correct scale now, have parameters made for enabling and switching the proxy objects. Subsequently added another switch in the network to make enable parameter not just disable the display in viewport, but also disable the rendering of that particular group of rocks (Red/Green/Blue/Yellow).

Maybe it's a bug... All of the rendering enable/disable seem to work except for green, will carry on to troubleshoot it next week where i have more time.






Varying material parameters/colours
This is what of the extra thingy i wanted to implement if i had time. Came across it when tamte on sidefx forum pointed me to Point-Instancing page of Old School Blog (www.sidefx.com). Where instancepoint() function is used to vary the red channel the most.

For my case it isn't going to work that way as instancepoint() work on "Object level" and not "SOP level".

In the image, an attribute $SC (stonecolour) was created and a ramp parm was added inside. Using chramp() to pick colours from that ramp swatch and sending $SC attribute down to "Material SOP" where it's being used as an override of "stone2colour" parameter.

The colours were getting too heavy especially from the green and blue channel, i used a multiplier to reduce the amount of green and blue. Wasn't sure that was a good idea or appropriate method but it got the job done for now... hehe. Plus you could override any parameters within the rock_02 material or whatever material being assigned to the "Material Sop", just choose from "Choose Parameter" drop-down box. Unsurprising, Mr Ron was the person who shared this technique!

Before vary














After vary