Thursday, July 21, 2011

GYES -- Random Material Generator (Percentage Randomisation)

I added percentage randomisation. Now you can control how much random your material is . You can randomise existing material as much you want. GUI update, click on Mode and it will navigate through several pages of the GUI. "Percentage" page will give you even more option to apply specific percentage randomisation to specific parameters, all other parameter not covered by the specific percentages are covered by the general percentage. When a specific percentage is zero, the general percentage is used instead for that area. When a specific percentage is not zero then general percentage is ignored and specific percentage is used instead. If you dont want to randomise that area at all, in "simple" page use the corresponding button to completely disable that area , the percentage slider will also be disable in the "percentage" page.

Percentage randomisation means that the parameter is randomised inside a range of percentage of the full range of the value. For example a 50% randomisation of the specular intensity means the following :

specular intensity start from 0 and end 1 , 1 being the maximum value , 50% of 1 is 0.5 . If your existing specular intensity value is 0.3 then randomisation will range from 0.05 to 0.55 , which mean it can be any value that exists in this range which is a diffirence of 0.5 or 50% of full range. Of course randomisation takes always the current value as starting point so the next randomisation will use the current randomised value. Randomisation is always 50% of the specific percentage bellow the current value and 50% above . If the percentage exceeed minimum and maximum values of the full range, then it will default to minimum and maximum accordingly.

There is a "help" gui page that offers a summary help for quick reminder of the functionality. "Template" page is empty as templates are yet to be implemented. "Simple" page has the old enable disable checkboxes which I have replaced them as enable / disable switch buttons (enable / disable randomisation for a specific group of parameters ) along with a general percentage that for convenience also exists in percentage page.

Did 3 minor updates, one fixes a nasty bug that did not allow the script to load on startup as addon and another one where for some reason the register_module functions fails in future builds from graphicall,org after the official 2.58a from blender.org . I have replaced it with register_class() for each class i use so it should work now and for every future build.

However both problems were critical to the execution of the script so I had to bump the thread.

After a complaint I changed the "mode" button , to a list box to make it more visible and easier to use , blender developers need to fix the menu button (prop_enum_menu()) to make it more visible.

I also reorganised the file structure. Now everything is located in a folder called "gyes" just copy paste the entire folder to your addon folder and you will be fine. Inside gyes/doc you will find gyes.pdf which is the official Gyes Manual. I no longer support wiki as its difficult to work on both (Wiki and Pdf) at the same time , that means that wiki will no longer be updated with latest features. The reason is no longer called "gyes random material generator" is because I decided instead of creating several scripts that do diffirent things, to unite all of them in one add on script that will make installation and activation alot easier, so that means that gyes will be alot more than just a random material generator in the future. I plan to finish a new script every year.

The download link has not changed, remember you can use the same link as it always has the very latest update and I am constantly uploading new updates everyday that I dont report here as often cause I dont want to bump this thread unnecessarily.

Here is the download link => https://github.com/kilon/Gyes

Here is a screenshot of the new mode button

Simple mode :



Simple Percentage Mode :



Help mode :



!! Important Note !!

With the as always helpful guidence of ideasman from #blenderpython I was able to download the source and build the latest blender release. From now on this script will support the latest build release of blender and not just the official release from blender org. So it should work for anyone who wants to use the latest build from graphicall.org . I will keep updating my source and rebuilding blender to satisfy this requirement and will upload the builds to graphicall.org that will come included with my script.