[HOU-1739] Texture projection transformation handle

[Hannes Drossel]

Hi!

What would be the preferred setup to transform a UV projection using the vray_image_file or vray_uvw_projection nodes in Houdini?

In maya you get the 'place3dTexture' node when projecting textures.

I can see that in vray_image_file node there is a uvw_transform input but Im not sure how to hook that up to say a null.

What I would like to do is to have a null that I could move, rotate and scale in the viewport and have that drive the texture projection placement. How do I do that?

Cheers!

[Gosho.Genchev]

The short answer is - currently not supported.

At some point back in the Beta the Make Transform worked with the input transform parameters of the UV nodes - mostly for controlling the Dome light texture. Nobody ever used it so we abandoned it. Because Houdini has UV mapping tools that match this functionality 1;1 (the UV Projection SOP) and it's fairly simple to work with multiple UV sets, we figured it's not necessary to add even more nodes.
Currently it's possible to plug a UV Projection's "uvwgen" output into the Image File VOP's 'uvwgen' input and use the Repeat U/V parameters to tweak the scale of the mapping. The down side is that there is no translation and rotation controls for the planar/spherical/etc modes. I can't think of a way to use a Null to drive the orientation of the mapping, though.

What I would like to do is to have a null that I could move, rotate and scale in the viewport and have that drive the texture projection placement.

I'll see if we can figure out a simple way to do this.

[Hannes Drossel]

Hi!

I was hoping that this 4x4 matrix would work as the transformation matrix of the uv projection. But it seams to do nothing.


About projecting in SOPs there are two major drawbacks of this workflow.

1. Its geometry resolution dependant. Low resolution meshes will suffer from uv projection artifacts.
2. To modify the geo attributes in lighting scene the geo needs to be unpacked.

I can see that the vray_tex_triplanar node has a reference transform parameter. Havent tried it but it sounds like the thing im looking for.

[Hannes Drossel]

Hello!

Any news regarding this feature request?

Cheers!

[bdancer]

As Gosho wrote we already had support for makexform node, I'll restore it in the next nightly.

[Hannes Drossel]

Oh! Thats great! Thank you bdancer !