Clone Polygon Mesh materials?

[Bullit]

I cloned an object that has clusters with materials , what is the best practice to have them render? Clone Polygon Mesh help says it doesn't export the clusters.

[Bullit]

okay i should have read more througly the manual. But there wasn't a link in the clone poly mesh to the material page.

[NNois]

just use a merge polygon mesh with an empty mesh, then you can update it when you want

[Bullit]

Nopes, at lest in my test, when i merge polygon mesh i loose the clusters.

[NNois]

you're doing it wrong, merge keeps clusters if you specify so

[Bullit]

I only find that option with non ice merge not with ice one.

[NNois]

Sorry for wasting your time, yes ICE never create cluster but you haven't specified you're talking about ice clones

[Bullit]

If that so it is me that i wasted your time , not you mine. Just when i said "Clone Polygon Mesh" or when i made the post in ICE to Houdini transition and you said that Houdini preserves functionalities that ICE don't i inferred that will be noticed.

Does ICE makes possible to get poly ID from the master clusters and give them to the clone and then put the materials in clone?

[grahamef]

You can read cls.clustername.IsElem on the source and use that to set a custom Boolean attribute. You can then use this attribute in place of a cluster by checking whether it is 0 or 1.

For setting materials, it's a bit more complicated. You need to add each material in use to the Materials array, and then set the MaterialID attribute on each polygon to determine whether it will use element 1, 2, 3, etc. from the Materials array based on cls.clustername.IsElem.

Depending on what you are doing, it might be a good idea to write a script that creates ICE trees that set Materials and Material ID on the source objects (or even group) and then just copy them over to the cloned or merged geometry.

[Bullit]

Thanks.
That is much more difficult than what i thought and i guess explains why Clone Polygon Mesh doesn't have the option. I would think that giving materials interactively would be one of first things to make with ICE.