Procedural Textures and Duplicates

[Winterfell]

Hi All,

I’m about new to Blender (not a real new user, but not quite exercised till now…) and I had a problem that I wished to solve with procedural textures and duplicates, but I can’t or not do it correctly.

I want to make some scene where there are a good ammount of very similar object that need to be essentially unique (some little random differences). For example a bunch of fruit on a tree, bricks in a wall, stones on the ground…
I want to make a model with those element each one with single object (I don’t want to make a wall using a box with a brick texture, I want make a brick and replicate it, but having little difference among each instance…).

I was thinking of using procedural texture to add some noisy color and bump map to make the object more unique and real (thinking of a real birck it will not appear a perfect box…) but when I duplicate the brick (both Alt+D and Shift+D) I got brick exactly the same, with the same “random noisy” texture.

How can I make the procedural textures (Noise, Wave, Voronoi…) different from one instance to another ?
I use Cycles and with the Coordinate node I tried to use both Generated and Object Coordinates, but the brick are always the same. They are different if I use camera coordinate, but then they will change if I move the camera…

How can I accomplish my desired behaviour ? (duplicate objects with random textures, color and bump map, obtaining different textures in the duplicates)

Thank you all

[Martin_Norris]

Hi,

There is a cycles input node called ‘Object Info’
This has an connection ‘Random’ which is different for each object
You can use this to drive some randomness in the colour/bump/texture etc.,.

For example

Hope this helps

Martin

Attachments

[benu]

Here’s a video tutorial using a similar technique to what Martin describes, with additional detail:

[J_the_Ninja]

With procedurals (and box mapped images) there’s another option too, using global coordinations. Instead of using the texture coordinates node, use the geometry node’s “position” output. This will evaluate using the absolute/world space position of the instance instead of including its transform. Just remember you can’t do this with animated objects, or they will appear to “swim through” the texture.