Object / Character Randomization / Batch Render (Blender 2.9 / 3.0 Addon - FZRandomizer)

[Music] fz randomizer is a plugin i created a little while ago that allows you to randomize mesh objects based off of shape keys after listening to your comments on version one i decided to get to work on a version 2.0 a total redesign from version one the flagship feature of this add-on all revolves around a host collection that is this right here and right now it says host is character so that so the randomizer revolves around this host collection but it's driven by sub collections within the host collection so if i were to draw this out for you you'll have a host collection and then within that host collection you'll have a bunch of different other collections that will represent all of the attributes for the thing you're trying to randomize so say this is your character you can have shirts hats so this so this could look like a hierarchy of a typical object you want to randomize this here indicates our host collection again the collection that everything revolves around in the randomizer all of these here would be our sub collections collections within our host collection that help make decisions for each random variant that we're going to generate you also have what's called a root object and root objects you don't define them anywhere but you you'll put a root object directly inside of your host collection so maybe this is the base mesh this is where you'll put your material library or maybe a second one if you have two which i found myself using multiple material libraries this is where you also might put a lattice which we'll talk about later so your full your full host collection would look something like this a collection that contains sub collections for randomization as well as other root objects and the thing about these root objects every object that lives inside the host collection will go to every single variant so every variant in this case is gonna have a base it's gonna have material library one and two and a lattice maybe there's seven shirts maybe there's five hats maybe there's two shoes maybe there's six glasses or ten pieces of jewelry it's going to pick one from here one from here one from here one from here one for here and all of those will go to make up a variant [Music] okay so have you ever gone hiking and you saw the little like little rock formation in the woods that's called a cairn i actually learned that recently i thought it was called karen everyone's saying oh there's the cairn i was like karen what no it's karen it's pronounced c-a-i-r-n that's a cairn anyway we're gonna make a cairn a karen is a perfect thing that we can randomize and let's let's take a look at our chart that we made okay so here's our chart now it kind of works out that i have bad handwriting because this kind of already looks like the word karen anyway so if this is our cairn our host collection here what are our sub collections going to be well in this case i used four sub collections and let's take a look at them we have the bottom rock we have the bottom middle rock the top middle rock and the top rock here's an example of a cairn right we can have a couple variations of the bottom rock a couple variations in the middle rock a couple variations of them of the top middle rock and a couple variations of the top and that's exactly what i did i have them hidden right now but if you look through the bottom i have i'll pull this over here just a couple variations here each one slightly slightly different but still round and each one is going to be slightly different the same with the bottom middle same with the top middle and same with the top there's four variations for each say i want to make x amount of unique cairns well i have a button for that right here i can check this box and that's going to mean whenever i generate them each karen i generate is going to be totally unique from the previous one say i wanted to generate a ton of cairns just i'm populating a wood scene i want to make something just i want to make a bunch of unique cans and let's say i want to i want to have 500 cairns for the woods i can type 500 of my variants and i'll go to generate them and it's going to give me a warning well there's not enough variation for 500 unique generations i have four top pieces four top metals four bottom middles and four bottoms well that's four times four times four times four so i can pull up my calculator and figure that out or i can just run the calculate possibilities button here and this is going to say 256. okay that's 4 times 4 times 4 times 4. this is the maximum amount of possibilities that i can have to do unique so if i wanted 500 unique generations i'd have to add a little more detail technically speaking i could go ahead and i can set this okay 256 and i could hit generate just a quick disclaimer i would always recommend you add more variation before you just try to generate the exact number of possibilities because that can be exponentially exponentially longer as it searches for the last missing link and honestly you'll get more unique looking ones if you just have more generations in general so i try to stay under 50 percent so if i want 500 variants i really need to get my possibilities probably up to a thousand or more and that's really not hard if say i would add another rock at the top and i would have four variants for that well then it would be 256 times four so then we're talking about 1024 variants and that's already double so just adding a little bit more variation can increase the possibilities exponentially this instance checkbox is great too because it makes the generation process a lot quicker this comes with a time advantage and also a data advantage for saving for saving on your data but it doesn't allow you to do things like use any of the shape key tools which we'll see later using instance is very powerful in a lot of cases to generate a lot of things but also can limit you if you want to use things like the variance scrambler which is located in the shape key tools so let's go ahead and run this let's say okay i want to do 200 unique cairns with using instances and i will just go ahead and generate that and it's going to run that and they've all been developed and it spawns a new folder called variance which each variant is within its own variant folder up here i suggest that you use your spawn tools anytime you actually want to use and manipulate these variants you create you have this this offset this world offset which is basically how far like think of this like an array right we're going to array these across the scene and at what length so say we're going to hit spawn variance and as you can see here it put all our variants in a line here and they're not very far apart so i will just actually increase the x distance it's not 0.1 but maybe just to actually one and i will respawn and looks like we need even more space so i will go more let's do two spawn variants now as you can see we have a different variant each each one of these cairns is slightly different from the previous one these are all a unique cairn unique stack of rocks which is really cool if i'd if i do say so myself that's pretty cool and what's even cooler is technically there's four objects here but by by instancing this thing you can just grab this as a whole piece and you can move this whole thing around with one orientation you can keyframe this thing with rotation location scale all all the good stuff and it's just treated like one object which is why it's so powerful just to to use your spawn tools here just to take care of all this [Music] okay so check this out so this is a fake nft collection i made called the baby blues whale club this is a little demo character i made and probably no more than 30 minutes making these assets so i'll show you the process here so i have a body right so our host collection is baby blues as we go down here in our randomizer we can see baby blues and i wanted unique variants so i had that selected um we have some shirts here for him available i have a button up i have an option for no shirt because if you want no shirt you need a no shirt option and that's as simple as making a an object as you can see the objects over here and i'll call it no shirt and i will go into edit mode here and i will delete all the mesh data in it and now it's just an object with no mesh in it basically it selected something with nothing in it effectively being no shirt that's just an easy way to get a little extra variation out of something um so i do that often is i'll have something with with no shirt or or no something else you know i have just this other shirt here you know nothing special nothing nothing crazy i have a little tank for my little well to wear isn't that kind of cute i also gave him some piercings thought that was kind of funny i have an assortment of glasses for my character as well as an assortment of things to put on the wrist an assortment of hats i have some masks available for the character just a couple different ones somewhere around around the neck so we can open up this advanced material options here and we have some material options in here we have what's called a link map group now i defined a link map group as a group of objects that all need to share a single material so think of it like any any grouping of objects that um need to share one material despite getting thrown a bunch of random materials we'll all sort of agree upon one material and be that material so say you randomize a character's beard a character's hair a character's eyebrow shape those are three different objects but you can put them all in the same link material group so you can put them all in say link matte one and that can be dedicated to all things hair so it'll pick three random pieces of hair and you can set them to all be linked matte one and then at the end of that variation it's going to go into the material library for link matte one and it will select a hair color to assign to all of those so that's just one example but there's many applications for this so if you want to make a material library any material library is assigned and referred to as any object that has matlib at the beginning of the name it's the same as those objects i said that are like no shirt or no glasses it's literally just an object that say i make a plane here and then i will go into edit mode and i will delete all the mesh data within it i can just change this to matte lib underscore and it doesn't even have to have an underscore i like to do that for for personal naming convention i think it helps you understand what's there but say this can be a hair material so matte lip hair okay cool so now we have a material library that's going to define our hair and again the second part is more just for you the computer doesn't care what's after matlib but it does care what what link map group it is so you can say well we've already used linkmat 0 1 2 and 3. let's use link map four so i will just change that to length map four and i'll hit set link mat this works on multiple objects at the same time so rather than uh naming each individual one i can just select all of them and i can assign these all to link map four or length map five and it'll change them it's like whoops this is link matte five it needs to be four i can either remove the link mat which will do that it'll just take it all away or i can set the link map there and you can change the link matte even though it already has one on there just like that but we'll go back to link map four um but i'm gonna delete all these objects as we don't need any of those and i have no hair on this character so i'm gonna delete that as well but that's how you set up a material library or a matte lib as i like to call as you can see i have a matte lip set up for metals for some cloth materials um and anything that has a matte lip on it so for example these hats all the hats are said to be link mats the link mat only affects material slot number one which means right here it'll only change this one so you can have an object with multiple materials on it like for example this hat it has to have a gold latch and a black belt around it which is materials two and three but material one will be the one set to change so this will always alter this can alter to be any any color it needed to be and it will change that based on the link matte assign very important note here to set a link mat to be changed you have to set what's called the material slot link to be object and not mesh and you have a material link and many people don't touch this but this is saying how's the material attached to this object and currently it's attached to the mesh and we don't want that we actually need to change this to object and not data and it will look like this first one you'll have this icon here you just have to make sure that is set to object and not data otherwise it will not link a material in but i have all of these pieces all stacked on the same same character here and since the body is also set for link matte it's linked mat 0 so the body is going to look for any material in link mat one material or link mat xero's material library and it has all these to choose from so that that's using the the material options there the link mats now once you have pretty complex characters um you can see as i talked about earlier let me recalculate these possibilities you know we have over what is that over 1 million 1.3 million possibilities um just for just for a character of you know four seven seven four nine three nine so you know the material the possibilities stack up pretty quick exponentially quick as a matter of fact and and you can see how it's really easy to to hit that threshold it will take your computer a long time to build all these so i i really recommend if you have a collection of of hundreds or especially if thousands of of pieces you need to generate one i would be i would caution when using anything over a thousand generates because it can really start to take a lot of time to build these um but that's not to say you can't do it you totally can it just will take a long time and sometimes can slow down your computer and blender even um while you're in the process of making it i would keep this variance number super low like 15 just so it has some not a lot to generate that way whenever you do generate hit generate it's going to run the process and it's already done i'm going to set this for two so that way it has two and i'll just spawn my variance and here is my spawns let's look through some of these here's my variations of the baby blue whales club baby blues whale club right so each one is is a unique variant and it will use some of the same materials but look look how it generated a hat with a different color and i like that color for that hat that's very interesting and that's the baby blues whale club now one cool feature also included was this q for batch render so once once you spawn all of your characters here all of your generations um you can cue them to render at the same time which a lot of people ask for because yes sweet dude it's cool to like make all these but how am i going to render out a thousand variations first thing you want to do is make sure you're spawning them all in the same place so i'll set this to zero so that way it's zero zero zero they're all going to spawn in the very center so if i hit if i go back to the beginning here and i just spawn my variants okay i have 15 variant spawns and again you don't want to be selecting anything up here i'm just going to turn this off you can easily move one full variant and all of the objects move with it which is really cool but you have this q for ren q for batch render and what this does is it checks to see how many variants did you make okay we have 15 so we're going to set the scene length for 15 frames and then we're going to set each of those to render on a different frame at the click of a button bam it's done right here 15 frames if i were to look through the camera they're all right here you can just hit control f12 or render animation under the render tab but control f12 we'll get the job done and it's just going to go through each one and render each different variation frame by frame and i'm doing this in ev so it's going pretty quick but it's also supported in cycles and i recommend doing the time if you can because cycles looks sweet so then you say all right i'm liking how this looks i'm ready to do it for real i need to i need to kick out 500 variants for this nft collection we're doing you can just change this number to 500 as long as the possibilities are there so clearly we're good to hit that mark and then you just hit generate and it will totally reset all those you will then have to re-cue for batch render um but that's just one button you push [Music] so i want to show you one last use case here for this plugin it's not all about characters you can randomize any mesh you want to using this which is the cool part what are we randomizing what's our host collection books we're making some books all right that's really what this should be called your host should be called the thing you're generating and that's books and what what are some sub collections we have in here well we have a sub collection called bindings we're looking back here at these guys back here and we have a couple different bindings i have turn these off for now i have this bind this first binding looks like that i have another binding that looks like that just a little more round and i have a binding that's actually no binding it's just a flat back book i have these frames here and really these are just a series of those fancy looking borders on the books as you can see here each one's got their own little their own thing going on a little shape just something to give it some variation and i just have books i have only two books here i have one that's just a a hard corner book the others rounded edge book here how this one's a little different is we've also included a lattice here's what's cool everything's applied to this lattice right everything has if i click on it in my modifiers i have a lattice stack in here that the object is this lattice and if i were to go into edit mode for this lattice i can just grab some of these vertices and start moving around and you see how how it actually affects all the mesh pieces they all move collectively almost like it's a corner pin in after effects and i love that but what i love even more is that lattice supports shape keys the same way a mesh does so i made a shape key for the height of this lattice or i made a shape key for the depth of this book how thick is this book gonna be or also how wide is this book gonna be but check it out right like you have these different shape keys and those can be used in conjunction with the book so let's let's go make some variants right so we have our books as a host collection say i want 115 books sure that's cool i don't need them to be unique so let me just go ahead and generate 115 instances and i'm instancing these 115 instances of the book and it's already done on the click of a button using instances can make it make it very quick and now we'll just spawn those variants and each one has a different material which i forgot to mention is because inside our host collection i have i have a material library like you saw before of book covers as well as a material library for the metals that represent the metals that would go on the front of these books here we have the shape the shape key tools which are what was originally presented in the first randomizer now those are still very useful if you want to use a lot of the the original tools however or any object that contains shape key data if you use the variant scrambler it's just going to easily scramble all the shape keys in all the variants so let's see what happens when i hit this button oh it gave us a random shape key now you're wondering oh they all look the same and yeah they actually they all are the same because we're instancing remember those there's pros and cons with the instance you can do really quick generations with this however it takes away the ability to alter them this is all one instance we're basically just doing a shape key scrambler on one instance of an object so let's just redo this i'll take instance off and i'll just keep auto spot on because we already like where everything's at all right so we regenerated all those and now what's cool is these aren't actually um instances anymore they're all their own they're all their own duplicated object which means if we use the variant scrambler bam bam let's turn this off for effect go to render view every time i do a variant scrambler we're going to get a different variation of book book shape and size all these books here can just change at a click of a button so there's still some stuff i actually didn't cover with this add-on um there is a good bit it can do and you actually for the most part have seen everything still working on it still putting out some updates for as it goes as i see things that need to be fixed with it but this is totally workable and usable and downloadable to you you can go get it right now so let me know in the comments if you uh how to downl it or little things that could be tweaked on it if you haven't already follow me on instagram guard53lgard53 send me your work that you make with this i love seeing the stuff you guys make tag me in it drop me a comment until next time [Music] [Music] you

Channel: FruitZeus

Views: 2,464

Keywords: Blender 3.0 Addon, Blender 2.9 Addon, Blender Randomization Addon, Blender Random Addon, Character Randomization Addon, Blender tutorial, Blender NFT Generation, Blender NFT Randomization, NFT Randomization Code, Blender Random Scripting Addon, FZRandomizer, fzrandomizer addon, fruitzeus addon, Blender NFT Addon

Id: vnJ9EmHI31s

Length: 22min 42sec (1362 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 19 2021