Katana Instancing

Table Of Contents


Working With Instances

The Redshift for Katana plugin supports instancing using Redshift Instance objects or Redshift point clouds. From the workflow point of view there are two kinds of instancing: using the “instance.ID” string attribute, or using instance source locations.



“instance.ID” attribute instancing.

The simplest kind of instancing is supported adding an “instance.ID” string attribute to any shape. If the string value is the same, the object will be created as a Redshift instance object. The first location extracted with an Instance.ID value will be the master object, and all the other shapes sharing the same ID will be instances of the first one. The visibility and matte options of each instance can be overridden.


 

Instances arbitrary user data

The plugin supports the instance.arbitrary.xxxxx” attributes to add user data at instance level to the Redshift instances or point clouds. In the point clouds case, the arbitrary attributes available in all the source locations must match. Redshift supports float (from one to four components) and integer arbitrary attributes.


Instancing from instance source locations

The plugin supports the instancing of “ instance source” locations. You can have any hierarchy and as many shapes beneath these locations as you’d like. To define the master object, use an AttributeSet node to change the type of the Scene Graph location to be used as the object master to " instance source".

To instance the master object, use the LocationCreate node in the Node Graph to create locations for your instances. Change the type of these locations to “ instance” and add a “ geometry.instanceSource” string attribute, that will contain the path pointing to the instance source location to be used.