[adman]

Juan

I asked the following in the Maxwell Render section:

I want to apply a fine bump texture to a complex surface but all the options I try; Cylindrical, spherical etc give either variable densties of texture and/or distinct knots in the texture.
I have come across mapping tools in other applications which appeared to distribute the texture uniformly across a complex 3D form, I think the mapping method was called 'chord length mapping'.
Is this the same as the currently disabled 'normal' mapping?
Or is there another workaround to achieve this?

I am curious about how to put a uniform fine grain texture (spark) on complex surfaces.
I understand that tailoring a map by developing the surfaces and modifying the map accordingly (u-v mapping) is not possible.
However, the primitive 'photoworks' appears to achieve a fairly accurate, uniform result with its spark eroded textures. Is there some way of doing this like an exagerated roughness control producing an overall noisy bump?
I know there are many product people out there for whom this would be invaluable.

Maybe you have another method to achieve a convincing spark texture over a surface which will not conform to the standard mapping projections?

Adman

[John Layne]

Watching this thread like a Hawke.

[juan]

Hello adman,

Is this the same as the currently disabled 'normal' mapping?

No, normal mapping is something similar to bump mapping. It is a way to store the direction of the normal vectors into a rgb texture, so you can work with a light model with few poligons and map a texture with normal mapping to light it better.

I am curious about how to put a uniform fine grain texture (spark) on complex surfaces.
I understand that tailoring a map by developing the surfaces and modifying the map accordingly (u-v mapping) is not possible.

Our texturing tools are still young (one month ) So we will further enhance it in the future. As you say, We can add other projectors ( as torioid) but you mapping only using projections it is not enough in a lot of cases. In the current stage, if you need to do a very accurate mapping with a SW model, you should export it to a 3d format like obj and open it in a 3d app (Max, Maya, Modo, ..etc) that allows uv mapping (this method can only be done with meshes, not with parametric entities like SW objects). Blender is free and the latest version includes very good unwrap tools, yo could do a very good mapping there. Then you can import the obj into studio to render it.

Regards,

Juan