CGTalk - Any good ideas how to get a twisting texture onto a swept spline (like a candy cane)?

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chromecity

05-20-2006, 08:45 PM

Hi folks,

I can't seem to figure out a good way to get a swirling texture onto a swept spline object, much like a candy cane. The object I'm dealing with, however, is much longer and has many more turns than your typical garden-variety candy cane, but the principle is pretty much the same. The only distinction is that the object already exists and has been tweaked into shape, so I don't expect to go recreating it using a cylinder and deformers just so I can use a cylindrical UV mapping or some such thing.

Any ideas? Has this been covered in any tutorials you can recall? I have C4D 9.6 studio, so if there's a way to get it done using BodyPaint, I'd be interested in that as well. Thanks.

Per-Anders

05-20-2006, 08:57 PM

well, the easiest way would be to jsut use tiles in lines mode and set it's rotation to be angled (you'll have to work out the angles at which the lines connect properly). the second easiest way would be to use the rotation control in the sweepnurbs object (and make sure that your path spline is subdivided enough to avoid pinching).

MJV

05-20-2006, 09:09 PM

Adding to Per's good suggestions, I'll say that I usually make a single tileable texture of the repeating pattern in AE using Motion Tiles to insure the stripes meet up properly.

Heliodor

05-20-2006, 11:10 PM

I'm not sure if I got the point.

I did this texture by using a tiles shader (lines) in a distorter. Distortion texture was a horizontal B-W gradient. Amount of distortion has to be 200%.

http://www.see3.de/demo/Spiral_tex_01.jpg

Hope it helps.

cookepuss

05-20-2006, 11:16 PM

Maybe I'm missing something, but shouldn't this be far less complex than it sounds? You don't have to mess with rotation properties or anything like that.

You want to simulate that single stripe that swirls around the spline in a helix-like fashion. You can't use a standard gradient procedural since it will only cover multiple color bands instead of a single swirl. The trick is really in the texture, assuming you want to take that route. To be honest, it took me longer to figure out what I needed than to actually implement it. :p

chromecity

05-21-2006, 02:18 AM

Thanks everyone for all the excellent suggestions.:thumbsup: I should be all set now. I was drawing a blank on this. Thanks for getting me on track.

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