Asphalt road shader

[jack-daniels]

Hello all

I'm trying to shade a log highway, and till now, i repeated uv on place2dTexture.
I know max can take texture and project (?) it on a curve road.
can maya do it also ? what do i need to search for ?

Thanx
E.

[nowayfra]

Why would you project a pattern onto your curvy road? The patterns then wouldnt follow the shape so isn't it better to use a good UV assignment? But if you want to project textures simply check "As projection" at the 2D-Textures tab in your HypershadeWindow before creating your 2D texture node. Now select the created place3DTexture node and place it at your likes. If you urgendly want to do it this way and also want your texture pattern to follow the curvy shape you should create a texture reference object. Whit this you simply lock a 3D texture or projected 2D texture to the surface. All texture assignment for your road is now referenced to this object and you could stretch the reference object into a straight road, done. Note that any influences of your original shape (construction history, deformes etc) get lost for your reference object, so it might be hard to get it into the desired form. So you instead could make a copy of your road and use the original object as reference. Every object with the same topology can be used as reference object. You then only have to make the connections for yourself. Open the connectionEditor and load both SHAPES into it and check Left/Right Display->Show Hidden, then connect roadReferenceShape.message -> roadShape.referenceObject

[joojaa]

Well i would guess he woild use the projection to hide the fact that a texture is repeating, not understanding taht you can indeed have several uvs per object. But yes theres all sorts of things one might want to use. Such as closest point on curve for finding the u and v cordinates for example (distance u and along ve for example), is possible.

[jack-daniels]

thanx guys, just came back from a few days without a leptop so couldn't replay.
I know how to do it in the wrong/long/dumb way, i hoped i coul'd learn the smart way of doing it, since Follow objects uv is an option in 3dsMax, i'm sure it's also can be found within Maya

BTW, does anyone knows when Pipline render manager will be out ?
http://lesterbanks.com/2010/07/pipeline-render-manager-for-maya-after-effects-and-shake/

Thanx
E

[joojaa]

Ahh.. So your looking for a tool for interactive placement of uv cordinates not really projection of anything. OR perhaps your looking to stamp several projections on the surfaces instead.

I know how to do it in the wrong/long/dumb way

Err... uv placement IS indeed the smart way to do this. All other ways just convolute the computation of things. MAking it easier to handle outside of the 3d application of choice.

PS: you can not just go and borrow concepts directly in name form other applications. See thing is maya and max differ in teh same way that a hammer differs form a chainsaw. Sure you can go for a chainsaw and use it as a hammer, but you shouldnt expect it to be just another hammer. All things come in the package they come in you can nlt separate thje good form the bad in that way, so you can not take whats good in maya and replace whats bad in max with it. Even idf they happe to overlap in allmost exactly that way.

PPS: You wil find that most maya users dont pine back to the days when they used MAX if they ever did. I ccertainly do not and its been a good 5 years since I last needed to use max for anything. Mainly because for me theres nothing in max I can not do better in maya on all possible measures. So you actually need to explain what it is the tool in max uses.

[jack-daniels]

Thnx Joojaa

so i did a road, straight, long, nice road. added jpg asphalt texture with yellow/white lines. so far so good.
clinets ask for bending the road and add 10 more meters.
but me ? i want texture to stay nice on the object.
is it possible or do i need to go back to photoshop and redesign my jpg ?

Thanx
Erez

[joojaa]

is it possible or do i need to go back to photoshop and redesign my jpg ?

Yes offcourse, but that actually depends quite heavily how you DID the object. But asuming its a loft of somekind then no problem. Just bend it by moving the loft points and add more loft targets, then rereange your uv coordinates. Done. Nothing additional needs to be done. To be honest if you connect a point on surface info node into the network and connect it to the uv placement node then it all happens automagically-

If its just formed out a a polygon plane tahts in the shape of a strip then extrude edge, And move the points of he extrude in uv editor in one direction, then split the poygons to suitable spans. Then jsut move the points to a bend with say a latice. Unwrap is also useful, just see how the unwrap works it should do the trick. Again the more history you ahve retained the easier it gets as you can just add more spans to thiongs before you textured them and adjust the uv cordinates to match suit.

But again it really depends on wheter you screwed up allready or not, and how badly. See we dont know how you textured it. But seriously making a road that can be stretched and turned into any configuration and it allways works is not exactly rocket science, so even IF you need to start over i dont seriously see any reason for it to take more than 10 minutes tops.