Turn on Multiple Painted Shaders Simultaneously

[masonspappy]

Anyone know if it's possible to turn on two or more painted shaders at the same time?
- MP

[N-drju]

You mean, like joining them together as one blending shader or just having them all visible in the scene?
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Oh, I think I know what you mean. You mean turning them on in the painted shader session view? Perhaps you could just merge all painted shaders together instead of having several of them?

My idea is also that if you want to get something within the painted shader area, then just fill it right away (with trees, texture, whatever) and you'll see what was already covered with this or that shader.

[bobbystahr]

Anyone know if it's possible to turn on two or more painted shaders at the same time?
- MP

Yeah I've wondered that. Is there a way to group them together...that would simplify some things I've tried in the past. To use them I could see getting each one in a Distribution shader as a mask and then running them both through a Merge shader, bu t I see no way you could get more than one active in Paint mode.

[masonspappy]

@Bobby & N-drju, that's my problem  - trying to turn on multiple painted shaders at the same time in the session view.  Occasionally I come across a situation where I would like to see if the shaders are overlapping, or leaving  gaps, and so on.   "Trial and Error" is a PITA

[bobbystahr]

@Bobby & N-drju, that's my problem  - trying to turn on multiple painted shaders at the same time in the session view.  Occasionally I come across a situation where I would like to see if the shaders are overlapping, or leaving  gaps, and so on.   "Trial and Error" is a PITA

Often masonspappy, when I'm setting up the areas of a terrain and doin it with Paint shaders I will apply each one to a separate Surface layer and supply a different test colour for each. Then in the top view you can see what you're after I think and touch up whichever one is overlapping or not getting to where you want it....

[N-drju]

Hm, to me it makes sense to just do texture, objects or whatever, right after you finish one of the paint shaders. Then you paint another. I mean, textures, shader and other things are visible during the PS session so this is exactly what you're after if I'm not mistaken.

This way in other sessions you can approximate what has already been covered. If you get, say, grass patches using painted shader as a blending and want rocks around it then bounding boxes of the grass will tell you what you already have painted and with what PS. I hope I put my point forward clearly...

So basically: PS - action - next PS - next action. Unless of course you have some other specific use of PS that cannot be organized that way.

[Oshyan]

The approach of just plugging your Painted Shaders into Surface Layers with different colors is probably best as there's no way to enable/display multiple Painted Shaders at once. This is by design to avoid error and confusion.

- Oshyan

[dandelO]

A long way around is to save each Painted Shader as a clip fle.tgc. Next, open the first one with Notepad or any other text editor.
You'll see the stored strokes between the tag <custom>... ... ...</custom>.
Take it in turn to copy each section of each Painted Shader code: <blobs version="1" numItems="xx"> ... ... ... ... ... </StrokeIndeces>, into the first Painted Shader.

Once all the code is copied to between the <custom> ... </custom> tags, save and close the text clipfile. When you import the clipfile now all the paintstrokes will be shown in one shader, as one shader, so you can't edit the individual shaders any more.
I'm not sure that's going to be officially advised, but it does work to merge all your strokes from multiple shaders into one.
There used to be a problem with the shader where it would become very slow and sluggish if too many strokes were used, I don't know if that's still a problem but, keep that in mind if you notice an awful lag with the big Painted Shader loaded.

[N-drju]

Martin, you never cease to amaze me...

I don't think this is a good idea for two reasons. Firstly, there is way to much to mess up in the process you described. Secondly this is of no use if you specifically created separate painted shaders to have, say, various objects applied to the scene at various areas. When you have all that governed by a single shader and not separate ones that you've created for just the purpose you'll have everything massed up in one area. This for instance includes grass or trees growing out of asphalt or something like that...