Material Scaling

[mattjgerard]

Hey all! Digging into the MatGraph, and got a great challenge at work. I needed to create a retroreflective sheeting material, the sort of reflective stuff for street signage and such. I started from scratch and built my own material in the material graph editor, and after a lot of playing around got something workable.

So, the material works on the simple plane that I was using for a preview object, but now that I need to start applying this to real geometry, I am finding that there are no scaling controls in the final material node. Is there a way to scale this procedural material and change the projection modes depending on the object I'm applying it to? Sometimes it will be a plane, sometimes it comes on a roll, like tape.

Is there a way to add scaling options to matgraph nodes?

Thanks!

[DriesV]

There is no straightforward way to scale all size parameters of all nodes.
Even if there was, it would not be trivial to always get consistent results.

This is a good example of why it is a good idea to keep the Material Graph as simple as possible. Fewer nodes are easier to manage. It will also make the setup easier to understand for others (and for yourself in the future).

A few tips to improve flexibility of a Material Graph setup:
- Rationalize your setup. Less is more.
- Try to reuse Texture nodes whenever you can. Rather than duplicating nodes, try to attach a single Texture to multiple inputs.
- Use Color Adjust, Color Composite etc. to modify existing nodes, rather than creating new ones.

Hope that helps.

Dries

[mattjgerard]

That does help some. I did try to keep the graph as clean as possible, and with more experimentation I can probably get closer to what I'm looking for. I was trying to keep everything procedural so the mapping and scaling would never loose resolution and would be more flexible. But it appears that might not be the correct route.

I am going to try more of a image texture route next, and see if I can get closer to the material with fewer nodes making up the texture,  and hopefully regain some of that mapping and scaling functionality.

It was really fun and interesting to figure out how to get all the nodes to work together, and I'm sure my cube-mates learned a few new curse words when I was figuring out which nodes can't be fed into other nodes and such