topic Trying to recreate Multishader with Switch rgba - how to transcend 20 limit? in Arnold for Cinema 4D Forum

Trying to recreate Multishader with Switch rgba - how to transcend 20 limit?

daniel2SH2D — Mon, 15 May 2023 12:13:51 GMT

Hi there,

I need to assign an old C4D multishader to a deck of cards, so that each clone in a cloner gets the next card in the image sequence. 78 images total.

I'm using user-data-int and a switch-rgba feeding the Diffuse of a standard surface with all the generic settings I want globabally throughout the pack, and so far so good...but I can't work out how to transcend this limit of 20 inputs in the switch-rgba...

Any tips?

Many thanks

Daniel

Re: Trying to recreate Multishader with Switch rgba - how to transcend 20 limit?

daniel2SH2D — Mon, 15 May 2023 13:01:26 GMT

There's a tut from Lee Griggs on Youtube that shows how to do with a Made-Editable cloner where you use user-data-string node in a node material, which looks promising...but is there a way to concatenate strings and leave the cloner as a cloner?

I can rename the image files to be sequential numbers like the cloner ID's and I've worked out how to feed that to the image name, but it requires the filepath...So how could I 'add' the filpath string to the cloner ID string and output a full filepath? 🤔

Probably also need the .png string to complete as well, yikes.

Re: Trying to recreate Multishader with Switch rgba - how to transcend 20 limit?

daniel2SH2D — Mon, 15 May 2023 13:29:15 GMT

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/arnold-for-cinema-4d-forum/multi-texture-shader-to-cloner-objects/td-p/11053714/highlight/false/page/2

There seems to be a working solution in this thread ☝️...

I'll test it and come mark the thread closed if it indeed works 🙂

Re: Trying to recreate Multishader with Switch rgba - how to transcend 20 limit?

peter_horvath — Mon, 15 May 2023 14:13:07 GMT

Unfortuntely, you can not concatenate strings in the shader graph. Probably your best option is the switch_rgba, driven by the clone 'index'. You can find an example in the docs of how to extend the switch node: https://help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_for_cinema_4d_ci_Shaders_ci_Utility_Shaders_html

Re: Trying to recreate Multishader with Switch rgba - how to transcend 20 limit?

daniel2SH2D — Mon, 15 May 2023 16:31:33 GMT

Thanks Peter - I found your thread from December last year that covered exactly this, works like a charm 🙂