Randomise the same texture across several different objects

[Brian Jones]

I can’t test right now but I would be trying to randomize the seed of the noise, if I understand correctly.

[Steve Bentley]

I’m not sure changing the seed will work because its still one texture over many objects. So the noise will change but it will change on all objects linked to that one texture. (more on this kernel of an idea in a sec)

Good try with the world space, thats usually the first best solution but you are right with it waving around the moss is literal traveling through the 3D noise field.

I wonder if you made a link list of the moss objects in Expresso and then linked a single texture to them all but one where you fed in a noise to that texture, and into that noise feed a seed number, where the seed that is fed in is the iteration number of the moss object in the link list. That way you get a different noise for each object and that seed number is individually consistent for each object.

[Xavier Bonet]

Hi, Brian and Steve!

Both your suggestions sound great! I haven’t yet played around much in depth with XPresso, so I’m not sure I would know where to start with either randomising the seed specific to one shader (which I’m assuming can only be done through XPresso) or making the list of objects all with one texture and then feeding in the a random noise (though this one seems like I could find out on my own through trial and error, but still the how to feed a number into a specific shader I don’t know). If you guys could recommend a resource I could read or a tutorial I could watch that would guide me better toward something like this, I would really appreciate it!

In the meantime, I have a sort-of-solution, as I continued researching into solving this issue. I found this tutorial: https://vimeo.com/51232088. Basically, the solution offered there was similar to the only solution I could think of in the beginning (that of manually changing the U and V offsets of each texture in each individual object) but to do it mechanically, through XPresso, and therefore have it be painless! Basically it’s similar to your ideas, but the random number being created is used to change the U and V offset values. Which is why it’s a sort-of-solution, because the texture is the same, it’s only offset. So in certain cases it’ll work as “different textures”, and the objects won’t look like clones; but in more detailed cases, one will see that there’s an offset rather than the true random generation that occurs in natural objects. It works for me in this particular case, however. Still, I’d like to learn other ways of solving this for the future.

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[Steve Bentley]

Actually if that works that’s brilliant. I hadn’t thought of shifting the UV’s. It would be the same process as the seed change in Expresso. (i’ll give this a whirl later and upload a sample if it works)

But (and I’ll have to keep looking for examples we’ve done) we’ve tried a number of times to have different iterations of the same texture on different objects (the Mograph shader can work sometimes – even on non cloner objects), but we’ve rarely been able to get there. I think it has to do with C4d (and expresso) populating and calculating geometry every frame, while the textures sort of live forever and are global. While you can pull textures into expresso they don’t have the same flexibility or iterational (irritational perhaps) ability.