[Steve Bentley]

We didn’t used to be able to pipe a material into an object (or at least change it) so there might be some legacy issues that are creeping in.
I also rebuilt the expresso node as I wondered if some of the User Data might be interfering.
The fact that we can make it switch once means the pipeline does work, but I can’t figure out why it won’t switch again or back.
Its going to be something simple that we’re missing. Jim and Brian will probably set us straight and there will be forehead slapping all round.

Other options:
What about the Mograph shader?
You can also keyframe where you drag materials into each object’s material tag. (but really that’s what should be happening here with the expresso – when you look at this area in the material tag you can see it’s got a controller on it from expresso, so it should be working.)
You could also write a coffee script in expresso as it has multiple inputs and outputs – use it like a multiplexer.

[Steve Bentley]

This is a head scratcher. Even simplifying things down so that a Constant feeds a value into the Active port on the xgroup iterations (and the inverse value into the other xgroup), it will only cycle once. It won’t return to the original state when you toggle the value back to 0.

[Steve Bentley]

Ok, Some of what I said before was wrong. The active attribute is being correctly controlled by the small node and being passed to the full xgroup. So you’ve got that right. I had to delete the enable port of the xgroups for some reason and then set them to Enabled manually. With that done and the small xgroup iteration groups set to enabled to (manually) I could get the change to cycle, but only once. Then its getting stuck and I’m not sure why.
BTW I had to use a constant node (set to 0….4) for the main input into the Switch.
Still checking.

[Steve Bentley]

I see what you are doing now – you are trying to enable the whole group. I think you need to both enable and active each xgroup. You may also have to do the opposite to the first when you want the other xgroup to take over.
I got it working here. Let me know if that doesn’t solve it for you and I’ll send my file.

[Steve Bentley]

I think I see the issue.
It looks (in rev 002) that you have selected the xgroups and then dragged them back in to use as nodes and you are sending an Active into this dragged in “iteration”. Unfortunately that has no effect on the original big xgroup. Is there a reason you can’t send a wire into the xgroups themselves? (the node is there on the input side but that node is not connected to anything inside)

[Steve Bentley]

Just having a look now – the Cow interface seems a bit slow today, so the posts might arrive out of order.

[Steve Bentley]

And is it just me? I don’t see any information going into the X groups. I assume you want the bool coming out of the Equals to be turning the On node on and Off node off or visa versa. Is that the intent?

[Steve Bentley]

I noticed that your “inputs first” is not checked in the Xgroups. You will need this so that the stuff that’s outside the Xgroup will be calculated first, otherwise the inner stuff gets down before looking at the input.

[Steve Bentley]

I think it’s just someone having fun with Andrew’s style and providing a tutorial at the same time. Hey, it save’s Andrew doing one.
Or it could just be a big conspiracy. I mean Andrew has been working with JJ of late. Perhaps VCdotNet doesn’t really exist at all and its just the inflight movie for us passengers.

[Steve Bentley]

My second post doesn’t seem to be showing up. Disregard the first and second – It was an issue with my system (the Switch node was being grumpy)
Can you simply unpack your x groups and send the output of the Equal node to each of the On and OFF texture nodes that are feeding the objects and feed it into the “On” port. Then on one of these pipes stick an Negate node in the middle so the result of the Equal node will be inverted for one of the On or Off nodes.