Procedural texturing... i think... any help?

[rocksy]

Hello,

I am new to the forum, and fairly new to Houdini,

I have a skyscraper model, controlled by a master control which the user can use to set the number of floors the building has. It uses a copy sop to increase/decrease the number of floors - and I am looking for a way to texture each window differently, without having to select each individually - there are hundreds...

Is there a way of extracting each floor number? Or could anyone suggest a good way of texturing the windows?

Im not near the file at the moment, but will post it when I get back to work, if my description is a bit fuzzy...

Thanks

Rocksy

[old school]

You could try a copy stamp approach. If you are duplicating the floors by incrementing the copy number in the Copy SOP, you can create a stamp parameter based on $CY or the current copy number. Pick that up with a stamp() expression up the chain to do your procedural texturing.

What you really need is a different seed value per window. Best done with unique primitive attributes per pane of glass = Partition SOP.

First isolate the glass sheets with a group very early up the chain. Where you build the first sheet. The Copy SOP will make sure all copied glass sheets end up in the same group.

After you duplicate the floors, separate out the glass panes with a Blast SOP set to that window glass group.

Use a Connectivity SOP to add a unique numbered attribute to each sheet of glass.

Use that attribute value inside your VOP network to either:

- index in to a different texture map

- index in to a different seed value in any of the various VEX/VOP noise patterns

To pick up a geometry attribute, you need to have a parameter VOP with the identical parameter name as the attribute. The type must match as well.

Hope that gives you a couple ideas.