Appling UVW Map to individual elements of an object... whats the best way??

[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.

[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

http://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 http://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.

[Stephen 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.