Patreon Tutorial #42 - String UserData & Randomization - Part 1 (Patreon)

Hey guys! In part one of this tutorial I will go over how Strings work and how we can create attributes on our points to leverage string data to pull in textures from a folder on disk. I will show you how you can control the amount of textures imported and build a simple GUI slider control with VEX to make it easy to adjust how many textures are read in randomly.

I will also go over some of the tricky aspects of this approach, and how we currently need to leverage OSL to do this. I also stumbled upon a string naming bug, which I hope will be fixed soon now that I reported it. There are plans on opening the RS Texture node, but currently this is the workaround approach we must take using OSL.

I also show you a neat tool I use often to quickly resize or convert images from one format to another. Finally near the end I show you how we can create other attributes to randomize our instances a bit further. You can find the scene and assets linked below.

Head on over to part 2 where I will be showing you how we can use multiple folders for even more texture randomization and applying this technique on a tree asset. Thanks again for all the support!