Randomizing clones of clones, material rotation and clean subpoligon displacement.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

>1. Is it possible to instruct effector to affect children of children
>of its current clone object rather than its immediate children. For
>example I have array of 100 arrays of a cube and I want very random
>order of the cubes in EACH of the arrays how can I achieve that? By
>simply making two cloner objects and two random effectors create
>arrays of IDENTICALLY randomized cubes – not the result that I seek.

You have a couple of options here:

A. Apply the same random effector to one or more cloned cloners –

You can achieve different randomization of all clones by using noise or turbulence modes instead of the default “random” in the effector tab. These apply randomization based upon the grayscale values of a 3D noise texture. Shader effector can also do this.

B. Apply separate random effectors to multiple cloned cloners –

In this case all you have to do is go into each effector’s effector tab and change the Seed value so that they are all using different seeds.

>2. Is there a way to rotate or flip UVW texture without actually
>rotating or flipping original image file? It is annoying to create
>rotated and flipped versions of an image for such simple operation as
>axis reorientation – I must certainly miss something.

Yes, you can do that easily by clicking on the texture tag and, changing the U and/or V scale from 100% to -100%.

>3. Frequently I see very clean rendersonline of subpoligonal
>displacement of procedural noise and bitmap based materials. But in my
>attempts to achieve similar results I always end up with pixelated,
>serrated edges as if each pixel (even in procedural textures) leaves
>the trail of its displacement – ugly result and no amount of
>additional subdivision can completely eliminate it. So what is the
>trick

If it’s a bitmap it will depend on the resoution and bit depth. The higher the better in both cases. For procedural noise it’s just a function of subpolygon count.

[Sasha Zelman]

Adam,

Thank you a lot for such quick reply. I will experiment with the first item a bit later, but to illustrate the issues with item number 3, please take a look at https://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles25/345323/projects/1194529/d88ac51c8b8c1383f6934f66fcc9865a.jpg image. See how some sides of this procedural displacement are clean while others are serrated. Is there a way to make them all look polished? Is there a way to achieve this polished look with a bitmap source and somehow round up the geometry on sides?

Your texture flipping tip was very helpful. Is there something like this for rotation?

Thank you again.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

As far as bitmaps go, the only thing you can do is increase the texture resolution, bit depth (32 bit is best), and subpolygon density. You can also experiment with different sampling methods for the bitmap. The default is MIP but you may get better results with Alias 1 or one of the other methods.

You can’t control texture rotation in the tag, but you can in the material. Easiest way is to load the bitmap in the layer shader and then use a transform layer.

[Sasha Zelman]

Thank you again for you help. It is a pleasure to learn from those who DO KNOW.