Hello!

I'm having trouble figuring out how to do this in Houdini and could use some help.

I have a tree model with a random Cd value on the leaves to give a slight material variation on the individual leaves. Then this tree is scattered on points to create a forest, and now I would like to assign a unique random material between 3 or 4 different materials (Some trees are in fall colors and some are green still).


So ideally if I could just create 3 groups each with a 3rd of the trees in them, its something easy for me to do with points or connected faces but just lost how to do it with entire objects.

Just a quick suggestion,

If you have the 3 groups on your points can't you just blast the versions you don't need and make 3 pointclouds, do a copy to points for each pointcloud?
There are many ways to do this, you could also use a point attribute on the cloud, the instance inherits the attribute or group, make 3 materials and pick the right group for each mat.

Hey thank you for the response!

Problem was it had multiple materials and multiple kinds of trees so if the materials are at a point level vs the pre scatter object level then I needed to separate the bark of the tree from the leaves which is what I did in the end since It was nice to use Instance anyways instead of copy sops.

I was think if for example you could set a random color to the trees then a material can automatically be assigned based on what Cd value is on it without the need of many point groups, however my problem was that I was already using a Cd attribute to randomize leaf colors… I could probably do something with Cd.r vs Cd.b channels but I have yet to figure that out with the material shading nodes that get the Cd value.