Stack materials, alpha....

[alekba]

For the second time trying to make a bigger scene in Corona. The first time I ran into a problem with the displacment, bump mapping, light....so delete scene and assign material from scratch in previous increment. Now I have problem with alpha. I left for the end  the model that has alpha in the materials. This model is not mine, so I had prior to converting to check all materials ( lumas in defuse slot and stuff like that ). I've tried various things, in the end I used a blend  materials, preview look good but on object can see only one material.
 So no stack material, no usage of blend material, what is solution?
http://i.imgur.com/qX30p89.jpg

[houska]

Hi, stack materials are currently WIP and will be supported later.

[Cinemike]

The new layered shader with masks and projector helps a lot until stacking will be implemented, but for someone with an unwrapping-free, native C4D workflow, stacking will be a huge time and life saver.

[alekba]

he, he I know this pain :)
https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/000/851/975/large/aleksandar-babic-top-f.jpg?1434556849
2 year ago I make simple test scene in Corona, use same free model.... but on the end I render in Vray, same problems. But even in Vray this is not easy, I have "great time" :D trying to put textures in their place.

 Couple times I make some stuff for Corona and always give up because some stupid things. In this picture I successfully put textures on car door and Coca Cola wending machine, use some tricks... do not remember, this is over year old, wait somewhere on my HD for better days for cinema users :)
http://i.imgur.com/V4QUssI.jpg

[houska]

Couple times I make some stuff for Corona and always give up because some stupid things.

If you could tell us what those stupid things are/were, we would be really happy to fix them for you! :-)

[Nuno]

Yes, stacking materials in corona is frustrating cause in it's current stage is not supported. I have seen on their road map that it's to be implemented next release. wohooo :)

Regarding your problem with material stacking. I found a dirty solution,  I had tested quite a bit on simple mesh and also in hard surfaces and its been working flawless.
Basically it has the same concept as the material stack but instead I stack geometry.

1-Add have the base material on the your object
2- Duplicate that object and delete the base material in object manager(you can just polygon select the part of geometry you will add the stencil and press u~p to split)
3- Create the new material you want and assign to the duplicated mesh. Do not forget to check and feed the opacity channel with a black and white image or shader.
4- Adjust the uv projection, placement and scale to your needs.
5- I tend to use the image or shader I used on the opacity channel also in the displacement channel with a max value 0.1, 0.05 or even less to pull it out in case its overlapping with the base material.

Hope it helps

[Cinemike]

I found the Projector shader to be the most flexible (because being "parametric") way to add decals and mix projections. I also found some people that loved Corona up to the point I told them to try the projector shader because they basically had no idea that it is there and how to use it ;)
I am really, really looking forward to stacking the c4d way in Corona (and to having interactive rendering to adjust materials, because the viewport representation is currently lacking with the projector shader).

If you don't have a clue what the furry ball a "projector shader" is or how to use it, I could cook up a few screenshots.

CU
Michael

[Nuno]

Yes, indeed! Projector shader is powerful, but if we need to assign 1/2 materials with 2 different uvw tag (different uv-unwrap)in the same mesh is not possible with projector shader as it only allow to toggle between projection modes(cubic\spherical, etc... it would be awesome if it allowed to select the uvw tag ID from object manager). :)
Sometimes we just need to go the way around to accomplish the end result.