Dirtying up a material and lighting problem

[Flint]

I've hit a few problems recently and have spent days trying to figure them out without much luck. So if anyone can help it would be much appreciated.

 

1. I've made a rock material base and now want to add some dirt/moss etc. The only way I can get it as a decal is to use the blend mode but as far as I can make out I can only do it once. I've tried composite mapping but for some reason it tiles (the rock has a UVW box map modifier on it so it shows up on all 6 sides). I've added a new UVW mapping modifier to it and set the map channel to 2 and in the material as well and set it to planner but it does not work and still shows up on all 6 sides and I can't move the texture by the UVW gizmo too. Annoyingly it does when I use a blend though. Composite mapping is the way I want to go though as I can build up more textures. All tiling is off in the material editor.

 

2. For some reason in my perspective view the colours are so bright it bleaches out what your seeing. Sometimes it's fine and then after a few mins, wham, you can't see your textures. Anyone else had this problem. I'm using mr sun and mr sky as lighting but turning them off doesn't help.

 

Cheers.

[DanGrover]

1. For starters, you can put blend materials within blend materials, if that helps. So you can effectively have as many maps building up as you want. For moss and things, it's always nice having a bit of a bump for them to help them stand out from the rock - this somewhat limits the contrast you can have in the rock bump (because the moss bit will need to be whiter than the whitest bit of the rock bump to stand out) but that's usually ok. As for the tiling issue, I'm not totally sure what you mean, but surely because it's a box unwrap, the material will always be projected onto the object from 6 different angles, and thus give the illusion of tiling anyway? Try just unwrapping the rock's UVWs and see if that helps.

 

2. Try using an Mr Photographic Exposure control and setting that to display in the viewport. This can be found by going into the Lighting and Shadows tab of the Viewport Configuration window and checking "enable exposure control in viewport" (in 2010 at least). That said, maybe this won't help because it doesn't explain why it only starts after a few minutes.

[SandmanNinja]

#1) You need to set some mapping channels, too. Here's a copy/paste from my notes. Hopefully it helps. It's after midnight in the Land Down Under, so forgive the short reply:

Combing logos with Materials

 

01) make a multi-subobject with 2 slots - one for colour/base material and one for logo

02) IN THIS EXAMPLE, the base colour is an A&D Material - set the DIFFUSE LEVEL to 0.3 - lets the logo show through

03) COPY the material from the first slot to the second slot

04) In the 2nd slot, click on the MAP button next to Colour, load the logo graphic in, and set the channel to 2

05) in the stack of the object, put 2 UVW Mapping modifiers - first is logo (channel 2, planar), 2nd is base colour (channel 1)

06) Logo mapping is set to Planar

 

 

#2) It's either Shift+L or Control+L - toggles the lighting default options in the viewport

[Flint]

Thanks for your help guys. I've tried the ctrl+L as I read it in another post on here but still didn't help. Worked out what I was doing wrong with the composite map. I wasn't clicking the second layer map to show in viewport, Doh. But it threw up another problem. Although I can see it in the viewport now on 1 side set as a planner map to channel 2 it doesn't show up in the render after I scaled it down and moved it. Think I will go back to trying Blend as I can add bump to it which I can't in composite (or so I think). Just have to have a play around.

Thanks again.