Can someone explain mapping channels?

For a single object you create multiple texture mappings and assign them a number. What do you do with all the channels after that ?

Each texture that is in a material can be assigned to a different mapping channel.

In a material drill into a texture, you’ll see after the mapping section an entry where you can set it to Mapping channel and specify the mapping channel it’ll use.

ok, you mean the bump map can have it’s own mapping channel compared to the color map ?
Is this mostly done for scaling (eg. a bump) texture separately ?

Is there a mapping tutorial out there with someone specifically showcasing multiple channels? Sometimes it helps to see these things in action.

Correct

I suppose so, but personally I would ensure these stay the same across channels.

I believe @BrianJ has somewhere a UV mapping video.

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Thanks for the clarification! So it’s a fringe feature. Just making sure I haven’t been missing out on something important. In all my years modeling was always using single channel. Some plugins have their own texTransforms (if a bump texture needs to offset and what not), so it seems if using the built-in Rhino render it’d be more useful then.

I haven’t made a video tutorial on multiple mapping channels but I’ll put it on my list to do. It’s essentially what Nathan explained… more than one mapping method is assigned a number so that you can pick which texture maps in an assigned material use which mapping method. For instance maybe bump works best with WCS and a gradient color works best as Planar.

There are a bunch of Rendering related videos here that may be of interest too

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Thanks guys, I appreciate the explanation.