SuperPhysical - Multiple assets

[guest]

Hello,

How do you manage complex scenes in SuperPhysical?

In the girlpower patches, Cons nodes are used to add different objects to the scene, their properties, their materials...
Not really convenient when you start to use more than five objects, and you need to manipulate them, spread them, or making them dynamic...

The standard way of manipulating models in DX9/DX11 (Geometry and Transform to Shader to Group) seems to be more convenient (or maybe i'm missing something?)

We can reproduce this way of working in SuperPhysical (duplicating the SuperPhysical module, and pluging each model into it's own SuperPhysical module)
But in this case, we loose all the interactions between models (shadows...).

So my question is, have you an idea of an easy workflow to work with SuperPhysical and multiple models??

By the way, thank you MrBurk for this incredible contribution, this is beautiful!

Thanks,

[mburk]

Hi,
you absolutely have a point here.
This contribution was not designed to handle large scenes.
I think having a lot of different instances of the shader doesn't really make sense, still the lighting of a scene should be the same for every object and there would be too much redundancy.
What would really be needed is some kind of material and file browser. Someone at NODE suggested to maybe use message for that.
In the next update everything will be a bit more streamlined and I will reduce the amount of modules and links as much as possible. So this should improve the situation a bit, but for now we are stuck in spreading hell, when handling large scenes.

[guest]

Hi,

Thank you mburk.

I'm thinking about the best way to create a basic file manager for SuperPhysical.

First thoughts:

• Import a model in a subpatch called like "ImportModel" (one subpatch per model, easier to manage the settings for each model)

• automatically put the textures associated to the model at the right place, based on their names (Model1_Normal.jpg -> Normal...)

• beside of each model, all settings accessible in one place for this model only (Roughness level, SSS level, bump level...)

• if the model is spreaded (by a Transform or any other parameter), all other parameters have to be spreaded too, to keep the same number of slices for each parameters, and avoid shifts in SuperPhysical.

• "collect" each slice in a list/spread (one spread per parameter), to feed the SuperPhysical shader.

Model_Slice0 : Model1.dae /// AlbedoTexture_Slice0 : Model1_Albedo.jpg /// BumpLevel_Slice0 : 0.5 /// TranslateX : 10 ...

Model_Slice1 : Model2.dae /// AlbedoTexture_Slice1 : Model2_Albedo.jpg /// BumpLevel_Slice1 : 0.2 /// TranslateX : 8 ...

Model_Slice2 : Model2.dae /// AlbedoTexture_Slice2 : Model2_Albedo.jpg /// BumpLevel_Slice2 : 0.2 /// TranslateX : -8 ...

Model_Slice3 : Model2.dae /// AlbedoTexture_Slice3 : Model2_Albedo.jpg /// BumpLevel_Slice3 : 0.9 /// TranslateX : -16 ...

Model_Slice4 : Model3.dae /// AlbedoTexture_Slice4 : Model3_Albedo.jpg /// BumpLevel_Slice4 : 0.1 /// TranslateX : 0 ...

Model_Slice5 : Model3.dae /// AlbedoTexture_Slice5 : Model3_Albedo.jpg /// BumpLevel_Slice5 : 0.1 /// TranslateX : 10 ...

Model_Slice6 : Model3.dae /// AlbedoTexture_Slice6 : Model3_Albedo.jpg /// BumpLevel_Slice6 : 0.3 /// TranslateX : 10 ...

...

Here is a simple patch to give a better idea:
SuperPhysicalFileManager.zip (7.6 KB)

What do you think about it?

Should be more elegant ways to do this in VVVV, but it's a start...