While playing with the new texture nodes I recognized that textures that are blended together
(creating Blend Texture) do not use their original mapping channels. Blend Texture overwrites their Mapping Channel. It is very limiting and shows signs of a bigger problem.
The real issue is that Blend Texture can’t make use of different Projection Modes for the textures that it is blending together. I would expect that there should be another Projection Mode called e.g. complex projection mode that would allow the Blend Texture to inherit Projection Modes from the upstream textures.
Unreal Engine Material blending textures with different projections. Black&White grid texture uses UVs of the object and the colorful grid texture is world-aligned.
Unreal Engine Material graph. Note that this is blending textures inside one material, not blending two different materials.
It might seem a niche need but it’s really not. Especially now, with the Grasshopper texturing nodes, material creation is no longer obscured by the Rhino UI and creation of more complex materials can be done without losing sanity.
- Usecase - Wooden floor with blended roughness textures. I want to create a wooden floor texture and blend (by using Addition Texture) UV mapped roughness of the wood and WCS projected wipe/scratch marks.
Because it’s difficult to find or create a wooden floor that looks exactly as one might need (even using Substance materials) I would like to approach this by using the power of Grasshopper to create a parquet pattern exactly as I want (by dividing the surface or so) and offset each plank UV mapping. On top of that, however, I need to overlay scratch marks that should be world-aligned.
- I had a project in which I needed to squeeze something out of low poly and rather poorly unwrapped furniture objects. They had normal base color textures and normal maps baked from high-poly models to imitate some wrinkles and folding of the material. It was an animation and there were some closeup shots. Because models were poorly unwrapped I had to add a world-aligned micro-normal map.
Test with Bella Render.
Bella allows you to blend world-aligned textures with UV-mapped ones. In this example, as I move the cube around you can see that the grid texture is moving with the object but the circles stay in place, they are using world tri-planar projection. I need that kind of blending in Rhino and thus in Grasshopper texture nodes (preferably to be used with Bella render, but that’s up to @jdhill)