Mapping Widget

[brianlogic]

Hello,

I am having a very difficult time with the mapping widget. I cannot seem to get the control points to appear so I can change the scale or position of the map. In the manual it recommends hitting F10. Well that works fine for displaying the surface control points on an object but will not make the points appear for the mapping widget. I don't think I even want to get into my issues with displacement yet until I can nail down placing maps and being able to size, place and orientate correctly. I understand you can enter in values in the properties panel but it has no effect on the map when rendering. The only way I can get the map to move or change scale is to use the texture editor, which is a total crap shoot entering values in the uv repeat and offset cells.

Any advice for mapping or the mapping widget would be very helpful as this is very frustrating and I need to hit a deadline.

Thanks in advance!

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Mapping Widget

I've never been able to actually turn on the control points of the mapping widget. Cafer, from McNeel Asia, was the one who originally did the manual, so I don't know if that was something that he had special access to. Either way, the best way is to turn on the mapping widget and manipulate that as an object. You should be able to move, scale and rotate the widget.

[brianlogic]

Re: Mapping Widget

Thanks a lot Damien! I'm a step closer to figuring this out. My goal is to be able to map an image, a bump and displacement correctly. I'm sure I'll be back for advice later.

Thanks again.

[craiggorton]

Re: Mapping Widget

After every Rhino service release, I've mentioned this bug and gotten not much support. I did, once upon a time (maybe in Rhino 3.0), get the control points, but not in a long time. I miss them dearly.
What's annoying is that once you start rotated a box mapping widget, the X Y and Z go with it. I've never gotten to a point where I could do it without trial and error after every rotation.
It would seem control points and some simple visual cues could really make the widget a usable thing.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Mapping Widget

As someone who was very familiar with mapping widgets from Max, I don't find that I run into too many issues with using them (on a macro level...micro's a bit of another story). Maybe that's my familiarity with them, or something else. I think to most Rhino users the concept of using another a secondary object to describe how you want the image to be applied is a little foreign, or maybe it goes back to most rhino objects/mappings being much less typical then the type of widgets available.

Basically what I'm getting at is that maybe the people developing the mappings (Andy at McNeel...and there was someone else to I think) are very familiar with the concept of mappings, so don't necessarily see where users are having issues with them.

One of the main things about the widgets is that, although they can be manipulated as rhino objects, they cannot be deformed like rhino objects. So, even though the control points would be nice, its not like you could take one of those control point and make it do something that would change the structure of the box for instance. Anything that you could do by having access to widget control points could be done just as easy as one of the scale commands, moving, or rotating the object.

As an exercise in understanding mappings, maybe it would help to make use of Rhino's Project command. Play around with taking different orientations of a given plane or box and projecting that onto an object to be mapped. This may give a bit more visualization of how the widget actually projects the image onto the object, and may help give some clues as to how to achieve a given effect.

If it comes down to having a realtime preview of the mapping on the object as you're moving it, then I can see how that could be harder to work with. I that situation I will try to put the mapping widget in a place/orientation where I know at least one element (a corner the rotation, size) is fixed, and then go with fine tuning things from there.

I hope this is at least kind of helpful, as opposed to it being my own incoherent rambling.