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Stacked Layers ?

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 12:16 pm
by jfrancis
How do I stack a ready-made material on top of another ready-made material through a mask?

Suppose I want to make a checkerboard of blue carpaint and gold metal. I would put the material of my choice on top, in its own layer, and add a checkerboard mask.

So how exactly do you combine two entire materials without laboriously copying the contents of every BSDF or layer? Is there a drag and drop way? And how do you do it in Maya's hypershade?

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Furthermore, I see a lot of people using layers within materials, rather than restricting them to between materials. This seems to make it even harder to quickly layer one full material (of many BSDF's, or more likely of many layers) over another full material through a mask.

Re: Stacked Layers ?

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 12:17 pm
by jfrancis
Every example I see takes one existing material (of multiple layers) and adds one simple new layer.

Re: Stacked Layers ?

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 4:34 pm
by JDHill
You can do this in MXED if you use the Embed MXM function (right-click in the material tree).

Re: Stacked Layers ?

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 8:13 pm
by jfrancis
JDHill wrote:You can do this in MXED if you use the Embed MXM function (right-click in the material tree).
Awesome. I will explore this. It sounds perfect.

Re: Stacked Layers ?

Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 10:11 am
by Mihnea Balta
You can do it in Hypershade by duplicating the layer node from the first material (including the network below it, not with ctrl+d) and connecting the duplicate to the "layers" attribute of second material. However, it's a bit tedious (especially if the first material has more than one layer) and managing that attribute manually is error-prone, so I wouldn't recommend it. We will add support for merging two existing materials in the next build of the plug-in. In the mean time, you can export the materials as MXMs and merge them with MXED, as Jeremy said.

Re: Stacked Layers ?

Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 10:28 am
by jfrancis
Thanks