Randomizing shaders on clones using Multi Shader

[Adam Trachtenberg]

First, make sure that the “use alpha strength” box is checked next to the random effector’s color mode dropdown. Then play with the Min/Max settings in the Effector tab. It helps to use the Interactive Render Region so you can see your changes in near real time.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Also, try the “synchronized” and “indexed” options in the random effector’s Effector tab…. Takes some experimentation for best results.

[Jacqueline Dessel]

Hi Adam, thanks for the help.

I’ve tried your suggestions and just can’t seem to get it to work. No matter what combination of settings I try, I still get the images showing up 3-3-3.

The Shader Effector has nothing to do with this, right? I’m not using it- only the cloner, a Random Effector and a Multi Shader I made in the Materials window…

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Hmm, are you sure you’ve applied the random effector to the cloner? To check, select the cloner and look in the effectors tab. If the random effector isn’t in there drag it in.

FYI, effectors are only applied automatically if the cloner is selected when you create them.

[Jacqueline Dessel]

Hi Adam, yes it’s applied to the cloner. I checked.

The Multi Shader is set to use Index Ratio also.

[Brian Jones]

For a simple step through a list of shaders no effectors are needed just the multishader (Index Ratio) in a channel in a material you apply to the object or the cloner. An example using colors rather than images for simplicity.

[Jacqueline Dessel]

But the problem I’m having is that the Index Ratio setting on the Multi Shader applies the same image to the first 3 clone objects, second image to the next 3, etc. I’m trying to randomize them.

[Brian Jones]

index ratio doesn’t work that way. If you have a single object cloned 15 times in a single cloner and a attach a multishader material with 15 images inside it it will put 1 image per clone. The only way (I can think of at this time in the morning), with that setup, to get an image that covers the first 3 then the next 3 etc. is to have only 5 images in the multishader then each image is placed on 3 clones. That’s why it’s called index ratio. 15 clones and 15 images gets 1 clone/image, 15 clones and 3 images gets 5 clones/image….

Either your setup is different, in which case we’d need to see it, or your first post had an error in it and you meant to say you have 15 clones and 5 images in a multishader.

[Jacqueline Dessel]

The problem I’m having is that I want 1 image per cloned cube, no duplicates.

I have 15 cloned cubes and I have 15 images in a multishader.

The result is, for some reason, that the first image is appearing on the first 3 cubes, 2nd image on the 2nd row of 3 cubes, etc.

Later tonight I’ll post a link to my project.

Thanks for helping me, I appreciate it very much. I’m assuming I just have some setting wrong somewhere and can’t figure it out. I was up until 3am the other night trying to simply get 15 images to appear on my 15 cloned cubes and no matter what I did I was getting 3 of the same image, and therefore it wasn’t using all of my images…

I’ll upload the project tonight with my images and all. Thanks again for your help.

[Jacqueline Dessel]

Aha.

I downloaded the file you supplied and changed the cloner’s mode to Grid Array, which is what I am using, and the same thing happens- gray on the first row of 5 squares, purple on the second row of 5, and so on.

I should have stated in my original post that I was using Grid Array. Maybe that’s the problem?

Thanks for the file.