The Instance Color texture is used to hold an image and prepares each pixel of the image to be mapped to geometric instance IDs.
As a LuaA scripting language that supports procedural, object-oriented, functional, and data-driven programming. It can be used to extend Octane’s functionality.A scripting language that supports procedural, object-oriented, functional, and data-driven programming. It can be used to extend Octane’s functionality. Script or any of the Octane Plugin Editions are able to generate instances of an object, these same processes can also assign an ID to each of the instances generated such that number of instances results in a grid instance IDs. Colors can then be assigned via texture to each instance ID, in this case with an image in the Instance Color texture, matching the IDs with pixels of the image starting at the bottom left in row major order up to the top right.
For the example below, there are 10 x 10 instances, and provided that a lua script was used to assign IDs to each instance there would be 100 IDs generated.
An image with 10x10 pixels may be plugged into the Instance Color texture to match these dimensions. And each pixel will be mapped and assigned to the instance IDs.
It could also be the other way around, as in the case where the dimensions of an existing image is used as basis for creating the creating the instances. Creating the instances and assigning an ID to each instance can be easily achieved by a LUA script, or provided by a plugin edition of Octane, or any other standard scatter plugins supported by Octane. Below is one example of the possibilities using explicitly defined IDs in conjunction with the Color Instance texture:
