Dupping obj w/projection map?

[Matt Leishman]

i hope i'm visualizing in my head your problem correctly.

its sounds like you need to duplicate the sphere so that the new sphere needs the history and input connections still attached to it.

When duplicating go into the duplicate option window and toggle on "duplicate input graph". Now do the duplicate command on the sphere. This should probably do it for ya. if not, come on back and we'll see if we can find another solution.

[Joss]

I did what you said and it did get the "place3dtexture" node to duplicate with the sphere but it didn't get the layered shader to go with it.

I don't understand that. if you have a shader with a projection map in it, shouldn't the projection go with it when applying the shader to other objects?

[noxy]

howabout this...
make a textureReference object and then duplicate the sphere. That way you can move the new one and the projection should stay attached. other ideas include baking the texture so the projection is converted to uv, or using a triple shading switch with a separate proj for each sphere, at least that way you don't have a bunch of extra materials.

Noxy

[misterdi]

Duplicating with input graph, will not give you new shader.
If we look at the hypergraph, shading engine (or SG group) is not and input connection for the object. That's mean all the duplicates will share or as part of only one shading group.

When it is render, maya will look into this shading group and use only the first placement3D for all object which is not what you want.

Other solution is using reference_object, but instead of just duplicating it and move the duplicate away you should made another reference object for each duplicate before you move it or you should use duplicate with "duplicate input graph" on.

This approach will give you hundreds of ref object if you do it.
Here is where duplicate with "duplicate input connection" (or duplicate -ic) will help you to duplicate while copying the input connection with the duplicate.
Instead of creating new node for each duplicate (as with duplicate -un) youwill only have one reference and all duplicate will use connection from this reference only.

You also could do the same thing if you have made duplicate with default setting, by doing the connection manually. For example you could issue, `connectAttr -f pSphereShape1_reference.message pSphereShape2.referenceObject`;

Or do it with "for loop" if you have several of duplicates.

It's a bit confusing for me also, since I'm coming from Softimage which handle this situation differently.

Of course there is also another route to handle this case by baking your 3D texture into 2D texture, the only problem is the result might be not 100% the same as original 3D texture.

Best regards,

[Joss]

I'm gonna try and make this easier on myself.

Can you bring in a color map texture with two alphas somehow?

this projection map needs to have an alpha channel for transparency and for specular highlights.

[misterdi]

AFAIK, all the Maya will only use one alpha channel in the image file, even if you actually have more than one alpha channel on the file.

So, maybe the solution is creating several matte texture file one for transparency and the other one for specular

But this mean you will need 3 projection node, which can share the same placement3D_texture node (so they were lock altogether).

And also projection node doesn't have transparency input hook, it only have image as input, which mean you might want to reverse the image first for the transparency.

Best regards,

[Joss]

Interesting.

Thanks for the input!

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