Hi,
I am getting difficulties in adjusting texture which contains ‘dirty asphalt’. Please find attached frame. I used UnwapUVW and UVWXform but still can not get proper size for this texture. Could you please give me an advice what do I do wrong?

Regards,
Piotr

Have you tried tinkering with it in the material editor?  In there you can specify sizing of the image.

Looks like a stretching issue that can be fixed in the Material Editor. Go to the road material then the diffusse channel and play with the U and V values. If you clickthe “Show textures in Viewport” icon (white and blue checkered cube) you can see tha material in your viewport update in realtime.

Hope this helps.

Piotr, You might be interested to take a look at a new bonus tool we have developed, which will allow you to do this very easily. Take a look at this:

http://www.3am-solutions.co.uk/community/tutorials/page/C49/shape_aware_texture_mapping/

That looks pretty good, Bruce. I think it will be easier than how I was doing it

I think this might have an obvious answer but this tool probably only works properly using imported MX data?

It should work with any surface/spline data.

Hmmm… I was getting an odd result, doesn’t matter, I’ll tinker more.  Looked alright on some MX stuff… I like

Is this a panel for a new 09 feature?  I think I saw a video on spline directional mapping recently.

and off topic… we’re beating you in the league world cup match as we speak… err… type

still 60 mins to go though

Peter - it uses the UVW Unwrap modifier which includes a spline mapping function from MAX 2008/2009. There’s a bit of extra magic going on in there too, but that’s the basis of it.

This tool looks great Bruce.  Wish I had it earlier of course;)  I will test it out on some imported DWG’s.  I would imagine that one would have to normalize the splines before using this tool?

Anyways, looks great and very useful.  Thanks for making the video tut too.

Bruce Harfield - 01 November 2008 11:25 AM

Piotr, You might be interested to take a look at a new bonus tool we have developed, which will allow you to do this very easily. Take a look at this:

This looks like an excellent tool Bruce. Dynamites very own seeding wizard This will be particularly handy for 3d Triangulation Meshes coming out of the likes of Geopak and PowerCivil where it is very difficult to group triangles.

I have always used a 2 step process for Geopak modelling type work, where I take triangles generated from Geopak into MX, seed them, and then import to DVSP. This can be a fairly time consuming process. I suspect that this new bonus tool will save lots of time and hassles. I’m always keen for that !!

cheers Mark

This “seeding wizard” element of this bonus tool can be developed further, it’s certainly just in a very basic form at the moment. This is the beauty of the “Bonus Tool” concept - we can put rough ideas out there from time to time to gauge your reaction.

What we want is for people to have a play with the tool, and provide some feedback into ways in which it could be improved.  One suggestion would be to have a facility which would allow string labels and correspnding material IDs to be saved to a style, so that a set of seeding instructions used once, can be re-used easily if the model is re-imported.

The idea is that dedicated strings might be created in MX, specifically to act as DVSP seeding strings. These could be generated as offsets from carriageway edge strings (perhaps in 2d only) so that they run down the middle of each length of carriageway. This would lessen the issues caused by narrow triangles that you’ll see in the video tutorial.

I must add that the seeding functionality in this bonus tool was sort of created by accident -  the intention was to build an easy to use spline based mapping tool, but it became very obvious during development that there was additional potential for some kind of seeding functionality too.

I know only too well that seeding materials onto triangulation in MX (and other apps) is one of the most contentious, time consuming, and downright unreliable parts of producing a visualisation. So let’s see whether an alternative method of moving this process to DVSP is worth pursuing.

Of course you could also just create a few simple splines in 3ds Max across the top of triangles that you want to group into a single MatID, and use those with this Bonus Tool if you don’t have strings in the right place in your design.

Maybe such function would be useful:

Seedeng along spline with left and right offset…if whole triangle is in that offset area then seed it…if it crosses one of the offset area then do not seed it