Procedural "Texture Map" Property ?

#1

Hi all,

I 've posted this in other XSI forums too, but still haven’t got any replies :

You can assign a “Texture Map” Property to any object in XSI, which is based on a provided bitmap texture. Can you do the same with a procedural texture ?

If not directly, maybe a workaround or any other way ?

Thanks a lot.

#2

Directly, not that I know of.
Indirectly, you can bake your procedural out to that UV space (rendermap property and rendering it) and deal with it like a normal raster texture map.

#3

Thanks for replying. I pretty much knew it couldn’t be done, but I wanted to see if maybe I 'd missed something. Unfortunately I see that I had not :frowning:

Baking to a bitmap kinda beats the whole purpose, which was to easily tweak/alter (or even animate) the procedural texture while using it to drive other effects (hair/grass distribution for example).

Thanks again.

#4

Well, there are tricks that can be done committing shading to lightmaps which people use to be able to display procedurals. You can have a look in that direction and search the forum a bit, but it tends to introduce an edge of instability to the process sometimes.

Ultimately what you talk about remains possible. Rendermapping or photogrammetry like techniques can be used to produce animated sequences that will drive something else exactly like you describe.
The problem isn’t really impossibility (you seem aware of this though), as much as the feedback loop to do it having this really annoying interval (rendering the maps) half-way through it.

Look into lightmaps though, maybe it will fit the bill for what you want. Can’t say much more since I’ve been rather unconcerned with anything MRay that isn’t volumetrics for a while now.

#5

Yes I 'm playing with lightmaps now, and at first glance they seem to help. The kind of “easy” control I was looking for is not there, but at least they provide a way - even if a workaround-ish one - to do what I 'm after.

Thanks for the input :slight_smile:

#6

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