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Mapping Textures for a Plant
A buddy of mine gave me some plants pre-composed in Cinema 4D. Cool! I started looking at them, and figured, that looks easy enough. Boy was I wrong.
I cannot, for the life of me, get my texture to map properly to the object.
This is what I did. I created a simple half-dome by creating a spline and lathing it.
Then, I created a b&w alpha map that would look like a kind of palm tree, with palm fronds reaching out from the center.
Then I created a material, and put the alpha map in the alpha channel, and set the color to green ( just keeping it simple for now )
However, there is no mapping mode that maps the texture to the object properly. I get distorted copies, or like 20 of them, regardless of what I do. It also wants to always map to one side of the object, rather than to the center, and no amount of X, Y, tiling or other adjustments seem to do it.
Looking at the plants I was given, I cannot figure out how the materials are mapped to the objects so nicely.
What am I missing? I know I can buy something… but this seems like it should be relatively simple.. and I can’t figure it out. Now it is the principal of the matter.
So, imagine an inverted bowl. How can I map the center of the alpha to the top center of the object, so only one copy of the material (tile 1 1 is not it) shows up??????
Joe
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2 Replies
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Probably the texture axis tool would do it (with the right mapping). There is no one way to do it but if you understand the mapping modes and that you can modify by using the texture axis tool your a long way there, and that’s not even thinking about BodyPaint which will let you do almost anything. Here is a very simple example. Check out the alpha.tif, it’s just laid on with a flat projection but at first it looked wrong until I rotated the texture axis so it was pointing down at the inverted bowl at the top of the ‘tree’.
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OK… I finally got it… it takes quite a bit of playing and paying attention to the mapping mode to finally get it… but it’s so easy once done.
So.. now… what the best thing to buy? I guess I could spend hours making trees, bushes, grasses and plants.. but there’s got to be something to “pay” for those hours!
Joe
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