Shader

Note:Please also note the Shader Field, which does a similar thing within the field functionality.

A noise shader (Voronoi) defines the position and rotation of the clones via its grayscale values.

The shader effector primarily uses greyscale values from textures to provide the effector with input values that it uses to transform clones. Textures must be projected onto the clones in some way. UV mapping is always used here without the use of Material Tags.

You can also use the Shader Effector to color clones (including lights!) directly by defining them:

In the Shading tab, select a corresponding texture (faster) or
Drag a material with a loaded texture onto the Shader Effector and select the corresponding texture channel in the Shading tab. If you have several Material Tags, drag the corresponding tag into the Material Tag field (more control over the projection).

When using linear or radial clone modes, the Gradient shader with type 2D-U is recommended in both cases.

Note:The Shader Effector is well suited as a Basic Effector if you only want to influence the position, scaling and angle of the clones depending on the removal settings. No shader or Material Tag may then be loaded in the Shader tab.

Tip

The Shader Effector is also well suited to generating random, discrete values. What is meant by this?

From left to right: cloned plate, shader effector with noise, shader effector with noise and additional colorizer.

Imagine a square plate that you clone in a grid arrangement. The plates should now be rotated randomly in 90° increments. The Shader Effector (Tab Parameter: W.H = 360°) can be made to do this with a little trick:

Create a Layer shader in the Shading tab.
In the Layer shader, create a Noise shader (the Cell Noise noise type is well suited here, reduce the Global Size parameter) and then a Colorizer effect ( Effect button).
In the Colorizer, set the colour gradient shown above (nodes all white, intensity 100, 75, 50, 25 percent). Make sure that the selection menu for the colour space is set to Raw. Voilà.

The Noise Shader provides a more or less random grey scale distribution - depending on the type of noise - which the Colorizer reduces to 4 discrete grey scales. As the intensities are defined in 25% steps, the Shader Effector can only rotate the clones by 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees.

In this way, all possible random discrete values can be generated. You then only have to adjust the Colorizer colour gradient to the number of levels.

The above example is included in the following scene. You will also find an additional setup with the help of fields. This makes truly random distributions possible, as the random field can generate noise-independent random numbers. The quantization is then performed by the quantize modifier layer provided for this purpose.