Random

Generates repeatable random values from a seed. This can be very useful for the procedural generation of variation. Numeric or colour values may be generated.

The random values are generated from a seed and a context variable - to get useful variation either the seed or the value of the context variable must be varied too.

user

Container for user-defined plugs. Nodes should never make their own plugs here, so users are free to do as they wish.

seed

Seed for the random number generator. Different seeds produce different random numbers. When controlling two different properties using the same context variable, different seeds may be used to ensure that the generated values are different.

contextEntry

The most important plug for achieving interesting variation. Should be set to the name of a context variable which will be different for each evaluation of the node. Good examples are “scene:path” to generate a different value per scene location, or “frame” to generate a different value per frame.

floatRange

The minimum and maximum values that will be generated for the outFloat plug.

outFloat

Random floating point output derived from seed, context variable and float range plugs.

baseColor

Used as the basis for the random colours generated for the outColor plug. All colours start with this value and then have a random HSV variation applied, using the ranges specified below.

hue

The +- range over which the hue of the base colour is varied.

saturation

The +- range over which the saturation of the base colour is varied.

value

The +- range over which the value of the base colour is varied.

outColor

Random colour output derived from seed, context variable, base colour, hue, saturation and value plugs.