Cineversity

Just wondering if i can output a gradient (or any other utility for that matter, eg noise) to multiple slots in multiple shaders using xpresso?

You can put a gradient node into xpresso but there doesn’t seem to be an output node where i could wire it to a texture slot of a shader.  Or am i missing something?

For example would be nice to connect 1 instance of a gradient node into say the colour and specular channels of 20 materials.  Then if i need to change the gradient, i only have to do it once rather than have multiple gradients all with the same settings.

Unfortunately I think this is a limitation of the way that shaders are handled in CINEMA.
Each shader has to to instantiated…that means be its own independent element.
So you can’t wire the same shader into multiple slots.
You can however drag multiple gradient shaders into the graphview and then link them together.
If you go for this I would suggest Rick’s xpresso maker scripts, from what I remember he had something in there to connect xpresso ports.
There are a few “reference” shaders out there too, which replicate this functionality…but the shaders themselves are still individual objects.

Ah i see, thanks Patrick, will check out Rick’s script, i still need to check out that tutorial.

All the best.

What Patrick says.

Hey Rich,

You might know my idea of asking about the initial problem, rather then just to answer the question. What do you want to do? If you need to set up that gradient only periodically, which means not as an animated option, you could use just an image. This image can be altered or swopped out easily, and the whole scene is supplied with new settings.

In some cases your could use several Texture tags (Alpha/add), but again it is case dependent.
Let me know what the core idea is—what do you want to do.

All the best

Sassi

haha, yes we talked about this before : ) .  Actually in this case there is no actual problem, i’m just curious.  I was looking at the slate editor in 3ds max - which works a lot like xpresso and i liked the way you can plug any shader into multiple materials without having to have a separate instance of the shader.  I was just wondering whether it was possible.  I think it would be useful workflow wise, but its not a big issue all in all.

I might add it to the feature requests though.

All the best

Yup, that is on my wish list since long. I think everyone who is familiar with node “scripting” loves those stuff, and it would fit nicely into XPresso and Thinking Particles users logic. A material editor and the same for Multi-pass please. Yes, please suggest that, the more people voice their interest the better. Until then you can open that image idea in BodyPaint and over write the previous version of the gradient.

The current workflow to use a gradient scene wide for complete materials, is the following: Three materials and the one in the middle is a pure Alpha channel based material, with any other channel if needed set to black. The one most right sided is set to MIX textures, and will show up only how much the middle one is visible. In this way the one in the middle is useable from one Material Editor for the complete scene. And the gradient or any other Alpha information (e.g., a movie) can be set in a different projection each time.

:o)

Thanks for that tip, in the meantime i’ll fire up the feature request form!

You’re welcome and I cross the fingers. :o)