Silverwing Quick Tip: Octane Attribute Node (For Easy Vertex Color / Vertex Map Handling)

hi there and a very warm welcome to this week's quick tip this week it's a quick tip again so it's not very long I'm going over how you get vertex Maps into your shading Network in octane in a very easy and non-convoluted way if you don't know about vertex Maps those are essentially informations on your mesh that can be used for many things but also for shading purposes in your Shader Network so in addition to textures and noises vertex Maps can help to additionally provide information for you Shader to get even more material detail in your objects so let's have a look in Cinema 4D and octane what we are going to do in Cinema 4D let's go over our scene for today so I've brought in my control pad that I've SDS modeled for our game boy if I go about and show the mesh you can see how it's laid out so let's go back to our standard view again we want to concentrate right now on the vertex maps that I created for the object so there are three vertex Maps per object and one is the convex map those are all the edges on the object that get scratches and highlights then we have the concave map where all the dust can settle in and stuff like that and finally we have a map that is controlling the classiness of the object so if we go over to our render view we can see all those attributes mirrored in the Shader so we have the convex map where you can see a little bit more glossiness and some scratches we have the concave map where the dust can settle in here and then we have different roughnesses throughout the objects for example the pad surface where you have those grip points those are rather rough and have a structure to them so you don't slip with your fingers while the base of the object is rather glossy and you can see that this is reflected here in the vertex map or rather the vertex map is controlling that in the Shader so if we are looking at the Shader this is very complex and the reason why I'm not covering this is because this is a quick tip and it would be way too long to cover this so I've already covered this in some other tutorials so if you want to know more about my usually half procedural workflow you can find that Linked In the description below what I'm going to show you is rather the essentials of vertex maps and vertex color workflow and how you can use them in a very easy way that is not the standard or obvious way you would use a Vertex map inside of your Shader so let's continue and delete the materials from our object here and then create a new material that isn't going to be a very difficult material so we are sticking with a diffuse we don't want to get all the properties involved so if you have a diffuse material let's just assign it and maybe call it Pat or something and then go and get active material so you get the right material in the node editor next the usual workflow would be to scroll down to your Cinema 4D textures and then to bring in a Vertex map texture or a Vertex map node and then connect it to whatever input you want and then link your vertex map in there you can do that by just dragging and dropping your vertex swap in and you can see that it's working just fine on octane what you also can see is despite I'm just linked one vertex map the other object recognized its vertex map correctly so you won't get a problem here so despite your only being able to link one of the vertex Maps the simula vertex maps with the same name are recognized in other objects but I have some problem with the link because it can break your scene so for example if I take the object that is not linked into the Shader and copy it to another scene and go into the Shader again of course there is the link missing because the link was originally linked to the other object not to this one and while it was working before because the name was right now it is missing a link with one object in the scene this might be not a big problem because it's easy to spot but with very big scenes it can be very messy and you would have to go into maybe hundreds of materials and re-link any vertex map that you've lost and the whole purpose of this tutorial or quick tip is to show you that there's a actually better way to do this where the link is established automatically between the object and the vertex method so let's go back to our original scene here so we are back in our scene so let's delete our vertex map here and create a attribute texture so I will search for attribute texture I've done this before so the name is still in here and with the attribute texture let's connect it to the diffuse again there is no link in here so the way the attribute texture works is not with a link but with a string that means the text has to match first of all if you use vertex color you can leave it at color map here but if you use normal vertex map you have to set it to float and then you have to type in a matching name to the naming of your vertex map so if you want to for example get the glossy map showing up just type in classy and voila you have the glossy map showing up here without the necessity to link anything so if I now take my object and put it into another scene here so let's create a new scene and paste it in here go to the material and get active you can see the written name here is still glossy and it will search any object with a Vertex swap that matches this name so the link is still established because the link is not something I dragged into the Shader but a string and the string will always work and search for similar naming despite the scene it's in and therefore it's much more robust in a way that a linked texture can never be the only disadvantage is if you have namings that are similar so if you have a Vertex map that's called vertex map and then you have a second vertex map that also is called vertex map this will not work because there's a conflict in the naming but on the other hand if you're doing that first step right you will get a much more stable result with all your vertex map and you can go ahead and produce some really nice shaders that will always work on all objects that have the same naming on the vertex Maps so I did this with my Game Boy project so every object had this vertex maps on them I could place any material on them and they would recognize those naming schemes in the vertex map and therefore adjust the material accordingly maybe this was a bit underwhelming and lacking a climax of some sort but I hope you find that helpful and if you're working with vertex Maps give you an advantage in your shading in octane so with that said I'm wishing you a good time a happy week and happy waiting bye

Channel: SilverwingVFX

Views: 8,157

Keywords: Tags: Tutotial, Octane, Cinema 4D, C4D, Octane Render, Vertex Maps, Attribute Texture, Precedural Texturing, Realism, Photorealism, Silverwing-VFX, Raphael Rau, Training, CGI, Computergenerated, Rendering

Id: nm2FSVKKFOI

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2022