Texture Map across uneven CVs...
 

Hi all - Texture mapping question...

I have a simple nurbs sphere, modelled into a head by
pushing/pulling CVs.

Now I have a head that animates well, but where I've moved
groups of CVs close together, my texture map pinches.
Where the CVs are far apart, the texture stretches. Yucky!

Since my texture is a scan of canvas cloth weave, the scale
of the weave changes according to the distance between CVs.

How do you tell Maya to ignore close/far distances between
CVs when applying texture maps to nurb patches?

- No procedural cloth texture solutions, I need to use client-specified
texture maps!

Dan

to get to the point, how would you make the texture of even scale across the nurb patch?

Dan

it looks like you might want to try a texture that gets projected though spherical projection and fit the 3d textur exactly around the head and animate the 3d texture as well.

maybe that helps

and another thing would be to rebuild the nurbs to even the points - or is this only possible with curves?

Thanks for the reply, BabyDuck!

I cant move the CVs around, as they need to be where they're concentrated now, so as to animate the mouth properly.

Can you give me a quick step-by-step re: spherical projection?

I'm transitioning from Houdini after 4 years, so I know a thing or two about 3D, but just finding my feet with Maya, so apologies for asking what is a basic question!

and What do you mean by '...animate the texture as well...?

Dan

There is a simple solution. Turn on the Fix Texture Wrap option in the shape's attributes. It won't show the result in the viewport (at least not with my gf2) until you render.

An example. Wireframe:

Fix Texture Wrap OFF (default)

Fix Texture Wrap ON

and i think i am not talented enough to explain how to do a step by step make a spherical projection. i know what i do, just assign a 2d texture w/ option "as projection" to the color of a material. and then click the 3dplacetexture and move it where i want it to project. i believe that the texture will stay in the same position in the room and floats through the object if the object gets moved. and to avoid that i thought maybe animating the 3dplacetexture would help.

what i mean by animating the texture (and i admit i was not clear about what that means). if create 2d texture as projection you get a 2d placetexture and a projection which got a 3dplacetexture connected. in the projection you have different types - planar, spherical, cylindrical. that means the planar is just like a plane that has the texture as a wallpaper - and if you assign it to an object it gets translated along its normal and paints all it hits. if you have spherical then you tape your texture inside a sphere (a rectangle texture gets stretched to make fit) and the surface of the sphere sends out color beams to the center of the sphere, projecting the color. the 3dplace thing you can move around in your scene to make it hit exactly what it needs to hit. but i am too new to texturing myself, so i dont know how to fix a texture once it got projected, and i would just move the 3dplacetexture when i move the object. there must be something easier, but my knowledge is limited.

hope it is more clear than before, if it was too confusing, just forget you just read it :D