Multiple materials per mesh driven by a mask?

Alex_J

Anybody know about a way to assign multiple materials to a mesh via a mask?

It would be impossible to assign the materials via faces in maya. Basically the idea here is to have lots of little details on a mesh get assigned a refractive shader while the rest of the mesh is a standard metallic shader. After a bit of searching I'm fairly certain this isn't possible, but why not ask.

EarthQuake

This is not possible, materials can only be assigned at the face or object levels.

Can you give some more details about what you're trying to accomplish and why you can't do it with face-based material assignments?

The Refractive model does have a mask slot, so you can use that to mask back to the standard material.

Alex_J

Hi Joe, thanks for the response. I did see if I could work some solution using the refraction mask, however because my jewel material relies on the Dota specular setup I couldn't find a way to incorporate it along with my gold and red metals. Maybe if I can rework my textures to feed into the dota specular setup and still look like realistic metal... but that means redoing not just the textures for this item but for many others as well... probably not worth the effort.

In this screen shot, down the middle of the crown you can see I have some separate mesh gems that are using the "stylized crystal" setup similar to the tutorial on ya'lls website. However, the very small diamonds scattered around are just baked onto the crown. It would not make sense to make each one of those a contained face or a separate mesh. I think they look "good enough" as is, but it would be nice to apply a simple mask that could then separate them out into an independent material.

EarthQuake

I think the only way you would get refraction on those smaller stones is to model them out. The problem with using a refractive material for this type of mesh is that it would show through to the character's head. So you're probably better off sticking with standard shader methods if you're going to fake the geometry like this. 

Alex_J

gotcha, thanks