Trying to create a timber board/panel material

[tricky]

I have a number of bitmaps of planks of wood, all the same size, around 60 in all.

I want to create a composite material that is applied to a bunch of panels in my scene, but each one of these panels must be made from 3 of these planks butted close to eachother. There are about 100 panels in the scene and in shot. They each need to look like they are created from a random selection of the planks.

What is the best way to do this?

I would have thought something like Multitexture would work, but I can't work out how.

[Neilg]

You can do this with multitexture - just model it correctly. Have 3 boxes next to each other with no gap, instead of a flat panel. Array them in panels and multitexture will apply a random plank & offset to each object.

[tricky]

Ah. Will try this. Wasn't sure if Multitexture would work with anything other than Material ID, but now I see the Object ID check box. My geometry is file linked from autocad. I assume all these 'plank' objects will be assigned a unique Object ID on linking...we'll see...

[tricky]

You can do this with multitexture - just model it correctly. Have 3 boxes next to each other with no gap, instead of a flat panel. Array them in panels and multitexture will apply a random plank & offset to each object.

How do I prevent Multitexture from offsetting the planks? I need each 'panel of 3' to have full length planks without a change part way along. Here is a render to show the problem. Perhaps this is because the panels are vertically running up the wall??



I don't seem to have any control on which way the planks are mapped. Here is an example plank:

[tricky]

Being stupid. Forgot UVW mapping!