Great thread ZeBoxx, very useful.
Hopefully your still checking the tread occasionally as I have a new question.
I adjusted the script to work very well with a VrayLight material that I’m using for the taillights of the car, gettting the values to jump between 0 and 1 for the multiplier from your script.
My question is how can I get this working for multiple cars from one material? I have a scene with several hundred cars, most of which are various instances and share the same material. In the above example each object would need a unique material (I think)
Would it be possible to change the Material ID of the taillight polygons instead of the illumination value?
For example, if MatID 1 is no brakes, and MatID 2 is brakes on, then couldn’t we have
current object MatID 1 = 1
if current object brakes MatID 1 = 2
if current object accelerates MatID2 = 1
and so on. This would let you use the same material for all the cars, but should animate the brakelights individually.
Not much of a maxscripter, so I’m not sure where to start. The script would need to be a part of each object, and the objects would need to be able to be instanced but have the script still know that’s it’s on a new object. Any ideas?
Thanks
edit – just looked through the other thread that you guys had on the brake lights, and looks like were trying a similar approach in that to my question. I’ll dig through that thread and see if I can gleen any new info
SJ
Redlancer, upon getting this script to work I had the exact same issue, which prompted a second thread (is this the one you referenced above?)
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=640818
Anyway, check about halfway down that thread the trick was the volume select modifier, which allowed me to use the same material globally.
gallion311
Yup, that was the one. I read through all the ideas on that one, and would probably work for me except the cars I’m using are VRay proxy meshes, so there’s no mesh to select via the volume select. You can’t really do anything to a proxy besides render it.
I think the only way for it to work with the proxies will be for the script to be able to do a MatID change per object instead of the color change per material (which works great on one car-one mat btw, but would be completely impractical with 3000 cars…)
beyond that, since there are no polygons to select, you coulldn’t just change the ID of particular polys, there would have to be a way to swap around what each MatID was, which, now that I think about it, still may need a unique material for each car since swapping the MatID in a global material would effect all the cars at once (seemingly…)
SJ