My first thought would be to use a low-frequency noise map in the bump channel, set to use world XYZ rather than object XYZ. The drawback I see is that you would probably see continuity in the pattern across panel boundaries, but perhaps that’s not a serious concern.
If you don’t want to paint the bump map, I suppose you could have two versions of the material with the bump maps offset from one another and apply them to alternating tiles.
I used Maya for a while long ago (in the 1.0 days) and this sort of thing was a lot easier with the Maya material editor.
Ive managed to get away with this by using alternating panels and 2 materials, which works much better. Say youve got a square panel layout, one material with the bump set to 2 intensity/500 size (X) and another at 3 with a size of 1000 (O), throw some material id’s on them and map them like:
Make a multi sub with the same material but differnet bump maps (or whatever) than apply a Material by element modifier to the panels. This is assuming they’re elements of a larger poly object. If not, attached all of them together. If it’s already one large element of a polygon object then explode it into separate polys (quads) so the Material by Element works as expoected. They’re also some scripts ot there to randomly apply materials to slected objects.
I sincerely thank you for the effort.
I found a way to do the geometry really fast with rhino.
One can always make the deviations in each panel with script in rhino or max.
Here are the details:
This way I can easily add some extra noise displacement if needed.
The reason why i asked here is because so many do arch viz in this forum and hopefully somebody was already doing something like this with vraydisplacement.
Doing it with a material would mean no tedious modelling.
You need to the glass panels to be a single object with a UVW map already applied to define the scale of your noisemap. When you run the script it should add a unwrap uvw, and then move the uwv for each face a random distance. If you find that the uvw’s are crossing the map seam, scale down the uvw’s and adjust your noise scale accordingly.
I’ve not tested the script with max2008 so save your work before running the script!
Usually the edges of the panels aren’t all that distorted, but then as you get in to the middle the oil canning (concavity/convexity) kicks in. So, you don’t really want any bump on the edges, but you do in the center.
To get that we will make a bump map using a mask of a gradient ramp on box mode, with a smoke (or noise if you prefer) revealed in the center, and then face map it.
Im just trying that method now jkletzien and the smoke noise map seems to repeat in each panel in the centre so i’ve applied another noise modifier to the actual glass geometry to hopefully try and break it up further
