Material Variations

What is Material Variations?
Material Variations refer to differences in material, allowing for a wide range of character appearances while maintaining the asset’s core identity.
With Popul8 Express, users can quickly and easily apply different materials to a single deformable asset, enabling the creation of multiple variations with minimal effort.
Currently, Popul8 Express only supports Albedo Variations.
Configuring Material Variation
You can add Material Variations to each Deformable Asset within a Template. Any deformables under Shapes will inherit the same configuration.
Select a deformable asset. In the Inspector, the Material Variations section will be displayed.

Enter a name for your color variation, drag the desired texture into the Albedo field and repeat the process as many times as needed to create additional variations.
Click Apply Changes to save all added variations.

Visualizing Material Variations
Drag and drop your Deformable into the Outliner, select the deformable within the Outliner (not from the project group). Use the Preview Material Variations dropdown to switch between the configured variations.

Setting up Material Variation in Crowds
After defining all your variations, you can apply them to crowds, enabling the creation of characters with multiple unique appearances
Crowd Rules
When creating a rule, all variations you have added will be listed under the deformable asset.
- Set the Weight to 1, to include the variation in the crowd, ensuring it appears during randomization.
- Set the Weight to 0, to exclude the variation from the randomization process.

Crowds
After setting up a Crowd Rule or simply dragging a deformable into a crowd character, a dropdown will appear.
- Use the dropdown to manually select a specific variation.
- Alternatively, preview the variations automatically assigned after randomization.

Updated 9 days ago