There are two additional custom nodes available inside SHOP nodes: NodeSelector and NodeSwitcher. These are not standard OctaneRender® nodes, and can’t be used by the shaders at render time. They can be used only at loading time as node tree selection tools to build node trees, or HDAs with selection parameters.
You can find these nodes by right-clicking or pressing the Tab key while in an Octane VOP network (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Accessing the Plugin Tool nodes in an Octane VOP network
One use case for these nodes would be an OctaneRender® shader containing two Materials. The NodeSwitcher chooses what material the object uses. You can also build an OctaneRender® tree with several kernels linked to the NodeSelector node and a dropdown menu to select the kernel to use at any given time.
The Render Target HDA available in OctaneRender® is built using this node to support all the render target nodes within one tool. Figure 2 shows how the NodeSelector node makes a parameter available to select the kernel you want to use for rendering.
OctaneRender® uses these nodes at loading time - you can’t use them in the shaders at render time.
Figure 2: The Node Selector used to design the default Render Target HDA