[REQ] color hue and saturation variations

[optimaforever]

Hello Thomas,

I don't remember if you already told me about this but are you planning to propose color variations of the thea materials based on clusters, patches and altitude?
I guess vertex color is too thea-core related but is there a way to change material properties like color hue and saturation of textures just from the skatter? Perhaps a discussion with Tomasz?

If possible I'd love to be able to change the specularity too to quickly create wet variations of grasses and bushes for these pesky but good-looking wet grass & roads scenes

[jiminy-billy-bob]

I have this in mind, but I really don't know if and how it can be done.
First, I'll do random materials.

[JQL]

We've discussed this with Tomasz before. I don't know if or when it's going to happen, if it's going to happen on Thea side or on Thea4SU but it has been considered an interesting feature to have, for skatter and a lot of other circumstances where randomizing materials would be needed (much more than just color variations).

[optimaforever]

Yup.
If Gianni or Tomasz provide the adequate API, programming Skatter to feed or be feeded by Thea should be a piece of cake (hum)...

[JQL]

I think the ideal would be that skatter has nothing to do with it and the mod.thea file would be able to be configured for material variation per instance.

The only thing skatter should do is provide a seed for the instance ID in order to have the same results with each render.

We wouldn't want to have an animation rendered wich would get material variations on a tree changing on each frame.

[optimaforever]

Indeed a lot has to be done on thea side... the thing is, presto actually doesn't support more than 3 layers for materials (I've read that somewhere on the forum).

[JQL]

That isn't a problem. With only one layer you can have incredible variations already. What do you need more for?

[optimaforever]

I thought multimaterial input in thea to be done thanks to multilayering, each layer corresponding to each mat id.
But indeed if it can be done in the texture slot (a folder of bitmaps or a filtered search by name instead of the sole bitmap), it could be more efficient layer wise.