Material Rectangle - new issue to me 2004-05-11 - By Kris Krieger
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At 11:37 AM 11-05-04 -0400, Michael C Horner wrote:
>I'll have to add another reason (besides the doubling up issue) to my usual
>avoidance of material rectangles. I have never run into a situation where a
>regular image/mask combo and UV tweaking couldn't do the job without
>having to resort to using material rectangles.
If you have an object (like that Greek jar I did, seems like about 100 yrs
ago) and just want to add a thin band of design around one section (such as
the neck of a jar or the top of a wall), and otehr bands around other
sections, you can use a tiny tranparency map rather than being forced to try
to UV-Map the whole object and create a specific series of textures and
transparencies for it. One the jar, I wanted shiny gold as the base layer,
with designs made by semi-shiny black (I forget what the real-world ceramic
glaze type is called, but there is a type of shiny black that seems to be
either slightly iridescent or to have very fine bits of different colors,
tho' the overall "gestalt" is black - it looks sort of the way that sunlight
gives a slightly iridescent sheen to the feathers of black birds such as
crows and ravens) (not grackles, or male starlings in breeding plummage -
those have actual iridescence to their feathers, or at least some of them).
And there were addidtional designs made by what is supposed to resemble a
flat, almost velvety, red ochre finish/paint. I think I also added some
flat white elements but now I can't remember.
Anyhoo, the point is, this would have been a huge mahala royal pain in the
bucket if I'd had to UV map the whole jar (a skill I've enver figured out,
to be honest) and THEN create umpteen different transparency maps, and layer
them correctly, and so on, and so forth.
For simple stencils and other easy materials, such as a basic gold filigree
layered on top of, say, red-painted sections of a building (I'm remembering
that Laos-type temple I did, also seems like 100 yrs ago), you're right, the
MR is usually not the best choice, and it is the completely wrong choice if
you have an object that will be viewed from 2 sides but is supposed to be
stencilled only on one side.
But for some objects, with complex bandings or layerings of different
materials, esp. when the designs are repeating ones, the MR *can* be the far
superior choice because of simplicity (easier to resize and move the MR band
than to spend days planning and creating whole-object textures/transp.maps -
*esp.* if you decide to change the locations of the sections/bands...) and
also because of small file size, since you can use one 5-byte B&W transp.map
of, say, a Greek Key design and simply repeat it. Yeah, you might need to
make a horizontal one specifically for the MR, but so what, just archive it
with the scene to CD or other permanent storage if you're worries about HD
space, and that way, you still have it available if you want to use it in
the futrue. It still takes a lot less HD space than would 10 different
whole-object files (for the jar, I think I would have needed between 6 and
11, don't recall exactly now, tat was a few years ago already).
HTH
- Kris Krieger
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