Skin Crawling

[Adam H. Stewart]

I am working on an alien animation. I have rigged a model and created a nice creepy skin texture for scanline ( this is a non vray project personal project, working in spare time at home ) the alien looked great in stills but when I animated the texture slides all over over the place (as if you where moving your hand behind a stretchy fabric - hard to describe).
I didn't want to bother with unwrapping the UV's, and have placed a simple UVW map under the skin modifier- should I have unwraped the UV's ? - anybody come across this issue before - will post a little test when I get a chance.

Thanks as always.

[davision]

Are you using an procedural textures? If so, set them to Explicit Map for their coordinates and use UVW to XYZ in the mapping modifier.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Thanks

That could be it - I have been using Noise maps alot - this is how the creepy bugger looks when he is not moving :

http://h1.ripway.com/Adam_Stewart/Fo..._AH23_0080.jpg

Freaking myself out looking at this at 3 in the morning - I'll try the mapping suggestions you gave me - thanks a million.

[davision]

Yeah, that's probably the problem. I've done the same thing more times than I'd like to remember.

If it looks like the texture is static, and he's moving through it -- then you don't have the procedurals locked down. Very common.

He looks good by the way. Very "Close Encounters"-ish.

[dellis]

I'm pretty sure if you add a uvw unwrap modifier at the top of the stack it should lock the texture to the mesh...procedural or not.

[DaForce]

yeah what you want is the UVW to XYZ uvw mapping type

[Adam H. Stewart]

Working tonight

I will be working on him again tonight - thanks for all your help and compilments, I was having a mild hernia this morning when I saw the result of my test renders - God awful, I knew there was only one place to find this kind concise and accurate help - this forum rocks !!!

Thanks again

[Adam H. Stewart]

Unwrap

I was working on my inner alien last night and I couldn't seem to get the XYZ to UVW mapping settings in the UVW modifier to work. When I changed the setting (from box) the bumps dissapeared and the other procedural maps went out of whack (scale settings didn't really work). What I ended up doing was using the explicit mapping channel setting in the procedurals and then using an unwrap modifier ontop of the stack ( under turbosmooth) it rendered like a charm (albeit a very creepy charm). A few anti-alias problems still to figure out but other then that it is looking great. I'll compress a version and post it tonight so you can all have the nightmares that I was facing at 3am when I eventually got some sleep

Thanks again for your help.

[joconnell]

If you want to make them stick, set the type for your procedurals to "explicit map channel". Note that the size for the procedural generally becomes far smaller - try using size values of around 0.1 for the noise, once you start seeing something that looks like your regular noise pattern in the material editor then you're getting there.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Scale

It must have been the scale that was throwing me out of whack. I need to do some experimentating when I've gotten some sleep - you know how it gets when your on a deadline and it seems as though everything is going tragically wrong.
Thanks a million for all your help.

[davision]

As I understand it -- when you are working with the default world coords in procedurals the units correspond to the 'world' units like inches or feet or whatever.

However, when you go XYZ to UVW then I think the whole object is mapped with the lowest value being 0 and the highest value being 1. Therefore you have to think of your procedural scale in terms of percentages -- like if you want the noise bumps to be 1% of his size, then you'd use .01.

I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure this is the gist of the way it works.

But Dwayne's idea to use UVW Unwrap is a more elegant solution. I'd forgotten about that trick. It saves you from having to rescale everything down to microscopic levels and I seem to recall is works just as well.