So i made a bunch of duplicates of a plant object.
All plants the same material which is good.
But now i want to apply slight changes on the material for different clones.
However the material setup is quiet complex and big and i dont want to redo it over and over again.
Is there a way in Blender to copy the node setup and then make out of it a new material instance?
The Object Info node can generate a random value per object it is applied to. You could make slight hue shifts with it automatically, if that’s what you want.
You can also add the node system to a node group (Ctrl+G) which you can use in different materials but with differences to the node input to make variations
so i plugged the object info random pin right into the Hue Node of my material. I think it worked.
How can i have more control about the randomness boundaries? With a color ramp?
I will try also the node group.
Things get very messy when you deal with hundreds of leafs. haha
My scene outliner grew very big. Is there a way to clean this somehow up?
I grouped s banana plant , but then dupliocated it a few times. So now i have hundreds of objects.
I need to work more efficiently. Lol.
The random value from the node will be something between 0 and 1. To change the range, or split it you can use some math nodes.
For example to change the random to give a value between 3 and 10, you can multiply the random value by 7 (10-3) and add 3.
Or if you want 30% of your objects to have different qualities, you can use ‘is less than’ 0.3, and then use this result in the factor of a MixRGB, or a MixShader.
With it you can tweak any parameters from your material, and the possibilities are infinite.
Thanks for the very nice answer. Seems logical. I just started to learn programming. I guess the programmers of the node editor did a great job if the possibilites are infinite.
Ich danke sehr.
A constant value is the Absolute Term in the Math Node?
The ‘Absolute’ term in the Math node means the same in math vocabulary, which is just the quantity, with no related dimension.
With Real numbers (represented in blender as floating point numbers), the absolute returns allways positive. So Abs(-4)=4 and Abs(4)=4.
The other operations from the math node use the same math vocabulary.
(as a note, the trigonometric functions, the absolute and the round operations will only use the first input.)
For a constant value, you can use the ‘Value’ node. That will output the same value in any circumstances, deshalb ‘Constant’. 
The math node can also output some constant values if the operation you are permorming has just 1 solution, for example when you multiply a number by 0, it will allways output 0.
For the ‘less than’/‘greaterthan’, the solutions will be 2, either 0 or 1. So you can also play with logic bricks.
Achso. Der Betrag.
Was eine Konstante ist weiß ich. :ba:
Thank you so much. I am just starting to realize the whole potential of BLender and i experiment more than ever.
You could also do it by script, https://bioblog3d.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/random-material-assigner-v2/
Hers’s the bearish bit for me using Cycles. I have a bump map setup, and I want to copy it and use it on another object with another bump map. Should there be a way for me to copy the set from one material to another, and just change the uv’s? It would save a lot of time if I didn’t have to repeat the same basic task over and over. maybe I just haven’t found the route yet. A complex animation I’m attempting. The render, regardless, is going to take up my vacation away…
Add to a node group, use this node group in another material with the bump map connected to a node group input
You need to make a node group of your bump setup and then in the list at the bottom you can re-add it as sort of template.