/3/ - 3DCG

>>678004
Well, [pic related] has 3 different layers of particle emission (brick particles, a particle that the brick is mounted to, a "rows" particle). At this moment, since there is only one pillar, it isn't a particle. However, If I wanted another pillar I'd add a 4th layer of "pillars" particle emission. The annoying part of this set up is that I have to multiply all of the particle emission counts for each layer individually every time I add another row to a pillar or another pillar to the scene.

Each of the layers has their rotation phasing and scaling randomly altered slightly in the particle settings tab. By offsetting the "brick mount" particle's mesh away from the object space origin I was able to use the randomness of the particle scale to drive variation in the bricks inset without scaling the bricks themselves. That said, this might be the wrong way of going about it...

During my fiddling I figured out that particles created with the use of "particle instancing modifiers" are emitted from the tips of where the particle hair would be (i.e. hair length doesn't scale the particle when it is created with the particle instance modifier, but does push it away from the hairs origin point). I'm going to rebuild the scene for a fourth time and see if I can just drive the bricks inset with a noise texture somehow applied to hair lengths.

>The bricks insetting isn't very noticeable because of the material's true displacement, but there is roughly a 4cm range of randomization between bricks.

I also figured out that I wasn't able to access particle info because my original attempts weren't using the "particle instance" modifier on the brick. Apparently using "render as object" in particle emission layering doesn't pass particle info into the particles material nodes.