Three Sided Material with Box Mapping

[mattcat]

Hi All,

I've been trying to figure out what seems like a pretty basic problem, but so far I haven't come up with a good solution:

I'm trying to make a cross laminated timber material that I can use for multiple panels oriented in different directions. Ideally, I'm imagining that there's some way to make a single material controlled with a single box map, where the X, Y, Z sides of the box control three different materials. I don't need to adjust these materials individually as far as their UVW sizes relative to one another, but I would like to have the mapping widget to be able to adjust the spanning direction of the material across hundreds of different panels in a given project. In the example below I've exploded a cube to mock up the effect I'm looking for, but I'd like to be able to get it without destroying my polysurfaces.



I've tried using an XYZ material, but I need more control than world coordinates, and blocking all my panels and using object coordinates would be too cumbersome for this workflow - I would much prefer to control the mapping with rhino widgets. I'm not sure I fully understand how multi-sub works, but it doesn't seem to be the right thing either.

Any ideas? I feel like I'm missing something obvious here.

Thanks,
Matt

[konstantin_chaos]

Hi Matt,

I don't fully understand the effect you're after but I can give you a couple of ideas.

First and foremost, if you want to manually alter the texture placement I'd recommend you use Rhino's UV tools.
You might want to unwrap one of the elements, duplicate it, join all instances and then use the UV Editor to offset each element's texture as you like.

If it is just random texture offset that you're after, then V-Ray might have something to offer.
Here's what you can do:

1. Create a simple material in the Asset Editor and connect the wooden texture to the diffuse slot
2. Navigate to the Texture Placement params of the bitmap and choose the Mapping Source type.
3. Add a UVW Placement to the Source slot
4. In The UVW Placement map expand the Randomization rollout and enable By Render ID
5. Set the UV Rotation / To value to 0

Konstantin

[mattcat]

Konstantin,

I appreciate the suggestion, but I don't think that's quite what I'm looking for.

Maybe this diagram is more clear on what I'd like to do. Ideally, I could use Rhino's cube mapping widget to control a three sided (XYZ) texture. By rotating the cube map widget, I could control the orientation of these three bitmaps on different pieces of geometry:



Because I want to use this material across a lot of different geometry, I want to avoid any per object UV editing, and try to figure out a way to use only the rhino mapping widget to control the orientation of the bitmap. This way I could easily change orientation for each panel, and match mapping with panels that have the same orientation. Basically, I want to make an XYZ material that is oriented to a cube widget, rather than the world coordinates.

Again, I understand this may not actually work, but hopefully this better conveys my intention.