redshift proxy's shaders picking up random colours from the points they're instanced onto

[willpreston]

 

Hi Guys,

 

is there a way to have tree meshes scattered on a terrain with variance in leaf colour on every single tree so that no two are the same colour?

 

back in the Softimage/ICE days i could scatter points on a terrain mesh and give the points a random colour

 

then i'd create a plant or tree mesh with different materials for  bark, leaves etc, in Softimage's node based material builder i would plug in an attribute node into a colour mixer merged in with the leaf texture map, this attribute would read the random colour generated on the scattered points

 

then i'd export the tree mesh as a Redshift proxy

at render time the proxies would be loaded in, and each individual tree's leaves would be given an individual colour variation within a specified range based on the random colour from the scattered points

 

this would mean each individual tree would have a unique colour added to its leaves and would be quick in the viewport/quick to render because of RS proxies (it also worked for Arnold standins)

 

I've been trying to do this in Houdini but am hitting a wall, I've tried material style sheets but that requires me to create a different override for each parameter i want to control then assign specific trees to those overrides, its still not giving me unique colour variation per tree, its also quite a pain to set up, on top of that mat style sheets don't work if there's more than one material on a mesh which makes it redundant in this scenario

I've also tried user data + attributes + shader switch but again you're using a mixer to switch between different specific shaders that you have to individually build,  

 

am i missing something?

 

thanks for your help Houdiniers