Animated materials on growing instanced geo?

[SamBoyd]

Is it possible to have animated materials on my instanced geo?

 

I have growing strawberrys and i would like to change the shader as they grow larger.

 

I noticed you can control the blend between colors with the vertex color option but i couldn't figure out how to apply this to my strawberry shader?

 

If this is possible it would be usefull but ideally i would like to have full control over the blend, ie. using noise maps to control tranistion between shaders and so on.

 

At the moment i just animated the material on my strawberry master but obviously they all change at the same time.

 

Thanks for any suggestions

 

Sam

[Eduard]

Hi Sam,

 

Your task is very interesting, but for this we need to create an affect to the current time of the material (when rendering). At the moment GrowFX doesn't allow this.

I think we should try to develop their own material plugin, which will allow change the current time, providing the material of different ages.

 

Cheers

[ptrain03]

could you animate the mix amount parameter of a standard mix map ? oh, wait, just read eduards reply more thouroughly, i guess not.

[ptrain03]

ok, I just tested this and it worked for me, hopefully it helps.

 

I made a material with a mix map in the diffuse then animated the mix percentage. After that I made a sphere and applied the material to it. then I created a grow fx object and used the sphere as an instance. Then I checked generate multisub in the grow fx instance geometry dialog and it worked. The only drawback would be that the growth of the growfx object wouldn't affect the material change so I guess you would just have to syncronize manually, however, if growth of the plant can affect the vertex color slider then you could use a mix map with a vertex color map for the mix amount, not sure about that though. I dont have 1.8 on my home machine.

 

good luck

[ptrain03]

I think this is doing what you want. The vertex position spinner is affected by the length of the distributor path and it is switching between two different maps. I just added a vertex map to the mix amount. It may not be exactly what your looking for, but I hope it helps.

test for exlevel.max

[Eduard]

Thanks a lot!

Yes, you did the right thing, it's still the only way to create a transition between two textures. Also you can use the Blend material, it will allow to create transition between two materials.

 

Cheers