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Mirror textures


Andrew West

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No Andrew, you can't use the mirror texture option in Maxwell, it only works in Renderzone as far as I'm aware.

Mirror texture is handy when a texture isn't seamless and you don't have time to create a seamless texture.

But, to get around it quickly (for me), is to open the texture in photoshop, double the canvas size XY, option drag the texture to duplicate it, flip horizontal, merge layers, option drag vertically the texture again, flip vertically. Then use the clone stamp if you want. Save as jpeg or whatever and re-import into Fz and double the placement size.

 

Tip for others, try to keep all your textures in multiples of 256 pixels for faster openGL loading and displaying. I usually use 1024px or 2048 etc.

 

Regards,

 

Des

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Hi Andrew,

 

Yes, Des is correct that the Mirror option only applies to RenderZone.  There are many methods for creating a tile-able texture, which will give better results than simply using the Mirror option (although that can be convenient).  There are many ways to create tile-able textures, and here is a link to one:

 

http://3drender.com/light/EqTutorial/tiling.htm

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This is an area where formZ and Maxwell are different.

formZ Shaded (openGL) does not display mirrored textures.

The ‘mirror’ checkboxes do affect Renderzone, on the object level.

Maxwell applies texture mapping at an individual texture-within-material level, not at the object level. So following those object-level checkboxes would not work properly. (MXMs are organized like this because can have an arbitrary number of UV projectors, and separate bitmaps for dozens of parameters. Each bitmap can be set to mirror, or not, independently.)

For texture mirroring in Maxwell, use a Referenced MXM and enable Mirror X and/or Mirror Y as in the thumbnail image below. (There is no need to use photoshop.)

We will consider adding mirroring options in Autotranslated materials as well. The reason this was not done originally was that Autotranslated materials were intended to be as simple as possible, to fit the Bonzai interface where they were first introduced. Originally there was only a single control— the material “Hint.” Now that we have added many more features for formZ, it probably makes sense to add mirroring as well.

post-32-0-65282100-1418828779_thumb.png

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I guess I have been pretty lazy over the years when creating my textures since I tend to photoshop a lot of them afterwards.   In order to get a nice random pattern I used big maps and mirrored them in FMZ texture editor.  The fact that they don't show up properly mirrored when editing the texture in shaded mode is an annoyance but liveable.  Of a greater concern is that in order to use Maxwell I  need to recreate an MXM for each texture that has the image map properly mirrored, or I need to go back into photoshop and correctly offset, adjust and clone my maps to be seamless.  To give you an idea of how that might affect my current project I have 47 tiled texture maps in one scene that need to be re created.  I will need to pass on using Maxwell on this one or any of my current projects until I can resolve this.

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