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Planar and Cubic UV projectors not visible and quirky

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 1:50 am
by feynman
Hi,

I am trying to project a wood real scale material onto a structure consisting of many planks of wood. However, the projector is never visible so I can't see where it is located in space and in which direction it is projecting in order for the projection to "hit" the planks at the desired angle and size. Please see the attached images; obviously I'm not understanding something basic here (I'm new to MXST since a week, my OBJ data comes usually from 32bit versions of MATLAB, Alias and Rhino - hence no plug-in can be used). In a tutorial somewhere, I think I saw a screenshot where a green box/plane (presumably a projector?) was visible. Oh, and why do Rhino OBJs come into MXST at such a gigantic scale?

Thanks for any advice!

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Re: Planar and Cubic UV projectors not visible and quirky

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 1:15 pm
by pipcleo
make sure you are in UV mode (top tool bar ) then select the object uv set in object parameters and the projector will
then be visible.

Re: Planar and Cubic UV projectors not visible and quirky

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 3:31 pm
by feynman
Hi,

ah, beginner's disorientation... Thanks very much for explaining where to click - I thought I was going insane; the manual isn't too forthcoming with basic how-to's in that respect, also in terms of visual but accurate placement of projectors in the viewport.

Strange thing is then, that the 1x1 metre projector is visualised in the viewport at 1000x1000 metres - it projects the "real scale" test-material dimensionally correct. And, the other mystery remaining is now why OBJ files from Rhino come 1000x larger - the object parameter's Scale input fields only allow 0,001 to be set as minimum, which is right in my case, but one can't scale items any smaller if one wanted to. But maybe this warrants a separate post...

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Re: Planar and Cubic UV projectors not visible and quirky

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 6:21 pm
by Mihai
You can change the decimal precision of any numeric input - right click, Decimal Precision.

The UV scale shows the values as relevant to the object it's attached to. So it means it's 1000 times bigger than the object it's attached to.

I would really suggest going through the Rhino plugin to export your geometry, maybe it has to do with some export settings in Rhino, or the scale you work in.

Re: Planar and Cubic UV projectors not visible and quirky

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 7:26 pm
by feynman
Thanks,

unfortunately, can't go through the Rhino plugin because our Rhino version is (x86) for some time yet - and MATLAB, Mathematica or Alias don't have Maxwell Render plug-ins. But I don't mind working in MXST which I'm using since a week now; once the object is generated it does not need to change so I can remain working in MXST for the rest of the project no problem.

I bring in IGES geometry grown in other softwares into Rhino and then use Rhino only to assign surface, planar or cubic texture mappings. The original softwares output at millimetres; and measured in Rhino it still is millimetres. So the massive upscaling happens with Rhino's OBJ conversion - 1000mm become 1000000mm. Maybe I just scale everything down in Rhino accordingly before exporting the different components as OBJ...