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Texturing over procedurals
Hi,
I’m struggling a bit with what many of you would see as pretty basic texture mapping. I’ve probably been thinking about it too long and have over-complicated it in my own head.
If you take a look at this movie:
https://homepage.ntlworld.com/w.werbel/temp/game.mp4
You’ll see a model I’ve built and textured with a procedural wood texture. The idea is to have decal graphics (i can swap out easily) applied to the faces of the spinners. I’m aware that I can use the ‘set selection’ command on the face polygons and then apply a material that makes use of an alpha channel to retain areas of transparency, but in my experience this always looks a bit shoe-horned on.
To get around this I was hoping to use the existing procedural wood texture as a base in a ‘layer’ shader and also use it do provide a bit of bump etc. Trouble is, I haven’t a clue how to copy this procedural into a ‘layer’ shader! To be honest, maybe this method is a bad idea on my part, as the procedural would probably be more troublesome to control when it comes to placement. So here’s my interim solution:
1. Use the procedural material to generate a large, over size texture.
2. Take my spinners, unwrap them in BP and ‘paint’ the pre-rendered texture on before re-importing back into 4D and applying back onto the spinners.maybe you could let me know whether this is a good way of doing it – or better yet – how would you do it?
Go easy on me! My self-taught knowledge of 4D is pretty basic, I muddle through but find myself doing things that seem the long way round for something that should be fairly quick and easy!
Thanks for your help guys.
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4 Replies
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I would stick with the procedural if you’re happy with it. You could use two materials stacked or use the layer shader.
In the former case, you could create a separate texture with alpha map for the decal and drag that material onto the object. The tag has to be to the right of the wood material’s tag. You can see the effect in the viewport if you go the viewport’s display menu and activate “stacked materials”. If you want to use the same bump on the decal, just the bump channel from the wood texture and paste it into the decal texture.
If you want to use the Layer shader then you’d have to create the wood procedural manually which can be done but not easily.
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Hi Adam, thanks for your reply.
>If you want to use the same bump on the decal, just the bump channel from the wood texture and paste it into the decal texture.
Hmm, the problem is that the wood procedural has no bump channel! This is why I’m asking about whether or not it’s possible to copy an entire existing procedural into a layer shader…
I’m still not convinced that stacking the materials will look any good. I’ll try it anyway, as I’m not moving forward with the procedural/layer method at all. Pff. I love 3D. I hate 3D.
Cheers anyway, man. Appreciated!
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w.werbel. uk.https://homepage.ntlworld.com/w.werbel/showreel/
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Yeah, it occurred to me about halfway through my post that you might be using one of the preset shaders. Personally I never use them because you run into issues like the one you’ve run up against. In your case I think you could bake it and use that as a bump in the decal material.
There is no way to copy a preset shader directly into a channel/layer shader.
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Cheers Adam.
That bit of info will cut down on the (already substantial) tail chasing I’ve been doing over the last couple of days!
Thanks again.
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w.werbel. uk.https://homepage.ntlworld.com/w.werbel/showreel/
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