The Instance Range texture is used to hold a greyscale color with the range 0 – Maximum ID and prepares this range 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 a grid of instances results in a grid instance IDs. Colors can then be assigned via textures to each ID matching it using the instance range. For the example below, there are 10 x 10 instances provided that a lua script was used to assign IDs to each instance, therefore 100 IDs are generated. To map the range, it’s maximum ID attribute must match the number of IDs which was generated, in this case 100.
You can further use other mapping textures such as Gradient texture in conjunction with the Instance Range to create some interesting variations.
Since the colors are stored as a texture, this makes it more flexible in comparison to storing the colors directly with the geometry and thus allows users to specify more than one color per instance.