hello vlado
Is it possible to add a "source " input for grabbing the object which is the source for the map?
like this you could use the map without including it in a material itself. today it’s only working when you add the map on the material which is applied to the object (carrier) which should interact with the objects to generate the distance.
best regards
themaxxer
Can you give a little more detail for this? Do you want to use the texture in a modifier, a render element or somewhere else?
Best regards,
Vlado
thanks for reply
I want to use it in forest pro for example. there you can only load a map as distribution map and then it would be great if the distancetex has its own system to work independently.
that means there should be an input for the source object. see image.
do you understand what I mean? 
best regards
themaxxer
It should work as it is… the texture itself depends only on the objects to which the distance is computed; it should work no matter where the texture is used. The caller of the texture (in this case, Forest Pro) must provide a proper implementation of the 3ds Max shade context though (e.g. it should be able to return the coordinates of the shaded point and convert it to world space correctly) - some plugins for 3ds Max do not handle this properly.
It might be possible to handle this on our end, but it would be a somewhat ugly workaround, so if it can be done in the proper place, would be best
Best regards,
Vlado
