Adding randomness to identical models

The first recipe we'll tackle in this last chapter is going to deal with a specific type of model instances. You might have heard about this type of asset before, as they are a common feature in many different 3D content creation packages. We use that name to refer to identical copies of an asset that get scattered throughout our scenes, where each duplicate is easier to render than if we were dealing with different models altogether. This can be a very cool technique to use when we deal with vegetation or whenever we want to place multiple similar meshes.

However, more often than not, we also want to change how each instance looks or at least add a little bit of variety to each of them—a task that isn't always easy. In this chapter, we'll explore a simple little node that will let us do just that, and assign a random value to each instance so that we can alter their look within our materials. Let's see how that's done:

Getting ready

As we always say, you...