Zeth Willie takes a look at an old-school utility node whos usefulness is very particular – the Maya Switch nodes, in this case the Maya Triple Switch. The Maya Triple Switch node will allow you to create one shader that can affect multiple objects with a variation in any channel of that shader. So as an example, one shader can be used for hundreds of objects, however each object could have a unique input in its color channel.
Zeth expands on the Maya Triple Switch premise with a cool little example of having a sphere object affect the color of hundreds of cubes based on its proximity- pretty cool! Check out the post for Using the Triple Switch Utility Node in Maya here.
Zeth Willie Writes: Basically the idea of the node is that you can create a geometry-specific attribute of a single material. So for example, you could put one shader on 100 objects and have, say, the color be different for each object. Still using just one shader, mind you.
