Layer Mapping problem

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Hugh,

Invigorator does wrap materials differently on edges (inside and outside) than it applies them to front and rear faces.

For front and rear, it’s straight forward. Invig stretches the image (or in your case, layermap) to fit the face. If the aspect ratios of the image and the object are the same, there’s no distortion. If not, you’ll get some squeezing of stretching effect.

For edges, Invigorator applies materials as you would apply a ribbon around the object, starting with the lowest, leftest corner of the object. Think of the ribbon’s height as equal to the depth of the edge and the ribbon’s width equal to the distance around the object. In other words, it’s normally very short and very wide.

To avoid squeezing/stretching type distortion, I would suggest creating a precomp in the aspect ratio of the edge material, with the elements of your layermap inside. Using the ribbon analogy, you’ll see why parts of the image appear upside down. You can fix that by manipulating portions of the image in the precomp.

(Here’s an example: when mapping a cube with all sides being perfect squares, the “layermap ribbon” would be one unit tall by four units wide.) Your layermap should have the same aspect ratio… its precomp might be 480 pixels tall by (4×480 pixels) wide.

Does this help?

Jon

[Hugh Howarth]

Thanks Jon,

That was very helpful. The mapping on the outside if the object just seems to take a lot of trial and error to get it right.

I created an oversized precomp with my footage and maunipulated it until I finally got it to work. I didn’t want to reduce the size of the footage, so going with a larger precomp for the layer map was crucial.

Thanks again for your help,
Hugh