Hi,
I'm curious how you all go about getting texture map variation on repeating elements like wooden planks, tiles etc?
In the past I was able to vary the texture UVW positions in Rhino to good effect. However, since I've switched to the Datasmith exporter, the individual UVW data does not seem to come in with the geometry and I end up with visible tiling. This strategy also obviously doesn't work when bringing in geometry from Revit or if you are using blocks in Rhino.
I was looking through the Lakehouse Demo scene (see attached) and noticed the the mapping on the wood planks on the deck and interior walls look the way I want them to. Does anyone know how this was achieved? It seems like the planks are all using the same texture but the mapping is applied differently to each object.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Thanks,
Hans
Hello ,
Thank you for posting your question in the community and for sharing the example in the Lakehouse. If you are going to have different UV mapping for different surface/meshes you will need to create different textures in Rhino/Revit so that when you import them into Twinmotion and then individually modify the scale, grunge, starting point, etc... as necessary. When importing models from Rhino/Revit you can collapse by material, which groups all the same materials together or you can keep the hierarchy which makes all elements separate (this is not always the best for performance and working depending on the project).
Here are 2 good videos showing the process and workflow with Rhino and Twinmoion and the documentation on the import process with the Datasmith plugin:
If you have specific examples of your files that is not working for you it would help to see, so we can better respond and see if there is a bug as well. Hope this helps and let us know if you have any follow-up questions.
Kind regards,
Vincent B.
Hi Vincent,
Thank for the quick and helpful reply. I've been doing some testing here to figure out what's going on and why I with the old Rhino Direct link I was able to control the UV placement via the Rhino mapping widget. It appears that it was indeed the "collapse by material" setting that you pointed out.
With that option checked in the direct link settings, I have been able to drive the texture mapping from Rhino as I could before. In the first image you can clearly see the texture tiling (I purposely chose a bad texture to see the effect clearly). The second image shows the texture map locations & orientations edited via the Rhino texture mapping editor. These changes do in fact update via live sync.
The UVW information remains controlled by Rhino even when substituting a default TM material for the Rhino material:
I've found a great little PythonScript over on the McNeal site that will automatically "jiggle" all of the mapping widgets to create variation across repeating elements:
https://discourse.mcneel.com/t/help-automating-randomizing-texture-mapping-position/42639/25
Hopefully this helps others in a similar situation!
Best,
Hans
