Youri Kovalenko

Hello fellas

What I'm trying to achieve in Solaris is
Using instancer, I'd like to scatter two or three different groups of species, where each group comes from USD file and has variants, and have those groups "cluster" together but still be randomly spawn. Thus cluster one would get 10 variants of ferns and cluster 2 would get all of the variants the second spieces.
I went through all the tutorials I could find and everybody does it the same way using Attribute adjuster, applying noise to index attribute and then ramping or choking it and passing that to instacer and supply a collection where each member of collection would go to that clamped index thus creating cluster.
It's all good but they only cluster using 2 or three 3 distincs spieces. I would like to cluster using 2 or 3 different Groups of speceices.


Attached screenshot shows my approach, two input spieces with variants, obviously the setup does not work.
Some magic is needed to force grouped variants per index and still randompy picking a distinct variant every time.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi all, hope everyone is enjoying the summer time

Little back story on what I'm trying to achive here.
I'm currently working on authoring bunch of assets from fbx to usd to later move our pipeline from 3dsmax to houdini and learning bunch of stuff along the way. Back in 3dsmax I can hit a shortcut and have any selected object's material pop right into mat editor for tweaking. This allows to fine tune tonality of many different , let's say, vegetation species very quickly to harmonize the overall look quickly and effciently.

Trying to do something simmilar in Houdini, so far I've authored bunch of assets, vegetation in this case all using a quicksurface shader. Once objects are written to disk and brought back as reference, with Make instanceable turned off, as in my first screenshot - Houdini does allow to do Edit material properties, so far so good, but that's for one asset only, obviously I'm going to need to scatter them, which, in case of instancer might work, setting input refferences to non instanceable.

Back to my initial question,
But what about using Layout tool ,
Once assets dropped into layout, we can no longer do edit materail properties, on layouts' prototype's materials.
As in second screenshot . Layout brings assets with Instanceable checked on, thus the error.
I found a way using Jump to Existing editor node to "hack" input reference and set them to non instanceable, this would clear error on edit material properties but the material in question would just break visually. Probably not the right way

Can someone point me to a right direction here. Are we talking classes here? Configure primitive?

Sorry for long post and thanks for any help.

Thank you
Very insightful answer

That clears up the question for me

Greetings