Now this is all fine for creating a one-color shader - you don't have to deal with any of the "physics" of light and know how to set these up - it's done.

But - now combining with pattern generators is a little tricky. It's not clear to me how I could modularize all the possible procedural patterns of other plugins, such as the "Spots" plugin that was derived from a post of mine long ago. How would we combine BBGlossy and Spots? Or BBCandyPaint (a substance) with BBStripe (a pattern) ?

Snarly - what are your thoughts on EZMat having the ability to smash together several plugins. (One for color, one for substance, one for surface deviation (bump or disp), etc.)

And then - for situations where one or more of these is not homogeneous, but rather needs to be modulated - what then?

And - for situations where a shader is itself a composition of other shaders, such as a checkerboard tile that wants to combine three plugins (tile1 tile2 and mortar) ????

All of these kinds of things are very easy to do with matmatic. But the presentation of the stacked and nested plurality of plugins??? Obviously this is what node-based UI is for, but this whole thing is about avoiding that altogether so it is EZ. So what is the solution?

Quote - All of these kinds of things are very easy to do with matmatic. But the presentation of the stacked and nested plurality of plugins??? Obviously this is what node-based UI is for, but this whole thing is about avoiding that altogether so it is EZ. So what is the solution?

Before I answer that, it is probably a good idea for me to outline the remaining work plan for EZMat. After doing so, i'll address your specific question.

EZMat work plan:

• Add a preferences tab to centralise the location of user configuration options
• Enable easy access to multiple preferred plugin folders
• Enhance Texture Manager to (optionally) set correct gamma on images
• Add scene picker control (user select multiple scene elements)
• Add overlay control (user selects placement of one image upon another, with optional resize and rotation of overlaid image)
• Allow plugins to create own tab in EZMat UI
• Allow plugins to build and manage plugin controls
• Improved align nodes option
• Enhanced MatHelper API to facilitate combining plugins
• EZMat user guide
• EZMat developer guide
• EZMat licence

Overlaying a plugin on an existing shader

I still don't know to what extent this will be possible given the range of possible shader constructs, but I'm optimistic that a lot can be achieved.

Behind the scenes, EZMat already does a lot of analysis of shaders. It will be enhanced to analyse a shader and identify so far as is possible the nodes in a shader where a blender needs to be inserted so that the new shader can be modulated with a mask, for:

• Diffuse
• Specular
• Bump
• Displacement
• Transparency
• Reflection

The EZMat API already has a function to insert a blender node and do all the necessary checks and reattachments.

For EZMat plugins there is the possibility that the algorithms for achieving this could be given a helping hand by adopting an agreed naming convention for the key nodes, but because that won't always be possible (e.g. when using Matmatic) it is important to me that the analysis is as robust as I can make it.

I realise that not all shaders will lend themselves to this approach. For example, I don't have a strategy yet for dealing with multiple speculars in a shader...

I'd welcome your thoughts and input on this, of course :-)

Since I still do use Matmatic whenever I use Poser - which has been less in recent times, but that's changing - I naturally have a lot of interest in seeing Matmatic scripts as "plugins?" for EZMat. I certainly don't pretend to be able to create anything even remotely as interesting as BB with Matmatic: my use is primarily to "fix" (maybe I should use the term tweak? :biggrin: ) materials of existing content, but there are times when I'd like to add a custom material to a regio, even just to have a play.

So, whilst the app doesn't claim to replace working in the "bare-metal" mat room for content development, together with Matmatic it could easily surpass what anyone can do stringing nodes together manually.

Just MVHO...

Quote - This is the entire source code to the plugin.

 

That's actually pretty amazing ...

There's no limit to how complex it can weave.

There is a limit to how much you can tolerate typing in all the bands. The pattern you showed me has 14 bands in it, as follows.

a = IColor(0, 96, 170)  

b = WHITE  

c = BLACK  

d = IColor(149, 149, 149)  

clrs = [   (a, 54),   (b, 8),   (c, 8),   (d, 4),   (c, 4),   (d, 4),   (c, 8),   (b, 8),   (a, 54),   (b, 4),   (a, 4),   (b, 4),   (a, 4),   (b, 4),  ]

I increased the EZMat plugin to support 14 bands, but I can't imagine people will really want to deal with 28 parameters like that, without the factoring that is possible as I did above. (That is the actual setup in the script, in Python. I was able to define the four colors as a, b, c, d, so it was easy to type. Entering all the information in a GUI is painful and tedious.)

I applied the same color pattern to a different weave pattern and got this.

Oooh, I want those mats! Would go well on an M4 work shirt or something!

Why does the first render look a little washed out compared to the second one? Don't get me wrong, they both look great, but I did notice the difference.

EClark, you have to take into account what sort of material is intended.

Those look great BB!

So to clarify ... this is GUI inside EZMat? or is this another version of Matmatic?

Quote - So to clarify ... this is GUI inside EZMat? or is this another version of Matmatic?

This is a GUI inside EZMat, which, when you click "Apply", invokes a new version of Matmatic from within EZMat to generate what you said you wanted.

So the workflow is:

1. Start EZMat GUI

2. Load an EZMat plugin, such as this new ez_BBLoom.

3. Pick your settings and hit Apply. (The shader is created by matmatic and immediately loaded into the materials you told it to go to)

Subsequently, you can:

1. Go into the Poser material room and tweak some more.

This is not a built-in EZMat behavior. It's part of the matmatic setup for EZMat.

Quote - > Quote - So to clarify ... this is GUI inside EZMat? or is this another version of Matmatic?

This is a GUI inside EZMat, which, when you click "Apply", invokes a new version of Matmatic from within EZMat to generate what you said you wanted.

Sweet! Will users need to download Matmatic separately, or will it come bundled within EZMat?

Oh - note to Snarly.

I found that calling the EZMat functions to add each node one by one (AddNode, ConnectNodes) was very slow - mostly because Poser is just slow at doing this stuff. The Poser Python interface generally stinks, apparently. I was generating a 127-node shader in .002 seconds and then it took 4 to 7 seconds to apply it via the EZMat API. Combined with the fact that the preview was also updated, this made a single material update require 8 to 14 seconds.

So I punted using the API at all and went back to writing a material file (once!). Then I just load it into the materials EZMat said to load them into. That's way faster. It takes less than a second. You may want to consider doing the same insize EZMat's API that other people will be using.

Quote - > Quote - Sweet! Will users need to download Matmatic separately, or will it come bundled within EZMat?

Matmatic won't come bundled with EZMat. That would cause some grief with multiple versions getting updated.

I'm not sure how I'll do it - probably the simplest would be if I just bundle all of matmatic into whatever plugins I distribute. That way you just install one of my plugins for EZMat and you're ready to use it.

Thanks, BB. I have a plaid skirt for Roxie I want to try that on. And if I vary the colors I can get several different textures out of this.

Here is a screen grab of the new BBLoom plugin, showing the first 8 parameters.

First is the Weave Pattern - these are files that define how the loom over-under threading is set up. As a user you don't have to know how to make these - but if you want you can make your own and add them to the set of patterns. The first pattern is the Plain weave, which is basically a checkerboard of alternating over-under threads. This is the only pattern built into Poser's "weave" node, which is obviously why I don't use it.

Anyway let's skip to the color palette. You get to use color pickers and choose up to N colors. (At the moment this UI is 5 but I'll probably make it 10 when I'm done.) Each color is designated by a lower case letter - as I've got it set here, a is off white, b is red, c is yellow, d is purple, and e is black. But remember, you can edit those on the fly.

Now - the cool new invention: the weave sequence fields. These are used to specify which colors, in what order, and how many times, to color the threads. You select a color by just using its letter. In weaving parlance, the vertical threads are called "Warp" and the horizontal are called "Weft". I may change those but for now that's what they mean.

The Warp Sequence is how the vertical threads are colored, left to right. Since I said nothing but b, all my vertical threads are red.

The Weft Sequence is how the horizontal threads are colored, bottom to top. If the Weft Sequence is blank, it will be the same as the Warp Sequence.

In this setup, warp is b (red) and the weft is a (white).

The weft threads are all white, so it makes a faded look. Does this remind you of any cloth you actually own?

The sequence 8ba means repeating everything in this word 8 times, so it's the same as bbbbbbbbaaaaaaaa.

Now I get wider stripes.

This makes two different stripe groups, the first has 8-thread stripes and the second has 2-thread stripes. The first group is white-red-white and the second group is red-yellow-white-yellow-red. This is a sequence of 34 threads.

Not all of these are attractive, and I've learned a lot about the aesthetics of plaid in the last couple days. But still - it's so fun to make whatever you want!

I noticed something in this and many other plaids and stripes - there is often a subsequence that is repeated in reverse after a unique middle part.

In the EClark plaid, the repeated-reversed part is 54a 8bc 4d - after the 4c that is in the middle of the repetition, it follows with the reverse 4d 8cb 54a.

I decided this appears often enough to justify a special notation.

In a sequence, if you type a left angle bracket <, then everything accumulated up to that point is made into a snapshot in reverse. When you subsequently type a right angle bracket >, that snapshot subsequence is played back.

So the EClark plaid can be shortened by using this feature, to this:

54a 8bc 4d 4babab

I won't bother with another screen shot - you can trust me that the outcome is the same.

When you use twill with two alternating colors in 4 threads at a time (4ab) you get a fabric called "Houndstooth".

So I added support for parenthetical subsequences. Basically if you put parentheses around a sequence, it becomes a unit, which can be repeated.

So 4abababababababab has 8 copies of 4ab, which can be reduced to

8(4ab)

Similarly, the 4...cdcdcdcdcdcdcdcd part can be redued to 8(4cd). So I can use

8(4ab) 8(4cd)

In fact, I forgot that the 8 carries forward in the same "word" and I could have simplified this to:

8(4ab)(4cd)

Note that the 4 has to be given again inside the parentheses because when you enter the parentheses, the repeat count is 1 unless you say otherwise.

This is because we expect that 8(ab) is the same as 8(1ab) not 8(8ab).

So:

8k

Means set k to 8. After that, any time you say k, you mean times 8.

The pattern called Glenn Plaid can be expressed using this notation:

8k k(4ab) 2k(2ab)

The 8k sets k to 8 and means that the size of the next two sections are connected because they both reference k again. By adjusting that 8k to, for example, 10k or 12k, you can alter the other two sections in perfect synchronization.

Note the 2k means 16 because that's 2 times 8. It is not the same as kk, which would be 64. (8 times 8)

The complete sequence is:

aaaabbbbaaaabbbbaaaabbbbaaaabbbbaaaabbbbaaaabbbbaaaabbbbaaaabbbb

aabbaabbaabbaabbaabbaabbaabbaabbaabbaabbaabbaabbaabbaabbaabbaabb

This is superb stuff BB, and demonstrates one of the aims of EZMat: to marry a convenient UI to sophisticated shader designs so that users can enjoy the benefits of highly configurable shaders without having to understand the Mat Room in great depth (or at all, even).

For those who may be just a little daunted by the 'algebra' of pattern design in a plugin like this, I should add that plugins can be provided with a selection of ready-made presets from which users can simply make their selection. Presets can also be shared between owners of the same plugin, so hopefully a community created library of presets will eventually emerge :-)

If anything is going to spur me on to bring EZMat to a successful completion, it's things like BBLoom that'll do it :-)

Quote - This is superb stuff BB, and demonstrates one of the aims of EZMat: to marry a convenient UI to sophisticated shader designs so that users can enjoy the benefits of highly configurable shaders without having to understand the Mat Room in great depth (or at all, even).

Indeed. In many ways, this is a lot of the stuff I always wanted to do but didn't have the time. (VSS) Having you deal with the UI takes a big load off of me and I can concentrate on the shader.

Quote - I also made parameters to remove all evidence of weaving, and make it shiny and flat. This is useful for wrapping paper and other striped things.

Looks like a shower curtain.

This plugin is brilliant. Thanks so much for your efforts!