JamesTaylor

Whats the best way to assign individual UVW maps to individual elements of a single object?

from the attached screen grab you can see that i have a no. trusses making up a pergola. I would like to assign a cyclinder uvw to each individual element so a wood map can be applied wrapped around each one. My plan was then to use MaterialByElement to assign a no. of varied materials to the elements.

Also, the model has been file linked from AutoCAD, as such i would like to keep the link in place so that it can still easily be updated... what i don't want is to spend ages going through each element one at a time and then have to do it again when the client decides to changes thing, as the site contains 10 or so structures of this nature.

Attached Images

ScreenGrab.jpg (102.9 KB, 29 views)

JamesTaylor

or... how can i assign random materials (in a simialr manner to how MaterialByElement works) to a no. of different objects without having to do it manually??

chiquito

I had a free plug in, checker box or something like that, I lost it and really would like to get it, cant recall its name, something like dashboard id, or similar.... Yo made a selection of poligon, and entered the amount of ids, and it assigned them randomly, from there to a multi material.

MrCAD

Here's the Solution..but fully working version is not free

http://www.vg2max.spb.ru/PolygonMap.htm

cheers

Meher
www.mr-cad.com

JamesTaylor

Martin, i think the plug in your talking about is dashboard id by Uniform's Sam O'Hare... you can pick it up at www.pixelpollen.co.uk (or whatever his web site address is - find one of his posts its listed in his footer i think).

The problem for me is that i want to assign the same id to all the faces of an element, but i want different elements of an object to have randomly asssigned values.

Meher, thanks for the link - looks interesting but i'm not 100% sure its gonna do what i envisage.

I've ended up just biting the bullet and assign each UVW map individually as a instance, it didn't actually take too long but i still hope they don't change anything on these elements!!

Its time like these that knowing Maxscript would be invaluable.

stef.thomas

Could you not just use a Multi/Sub-object material and assign different id's for each direction, then apply a UVW map for each id? Or detach the elements with matching directions to seperate objects and apply a UVW map for each object, then apply a single material to the whole thing. Or don't bother with UVW maps and use real-world coordinates, remembering to check generate mapping coordinates and real-world coordinates when creating your objects.