So, I’m just making a basic brick surface using a brick texture. I want it to go around in a circular fashion, around this plaza,
It’s going to depend on your mesh.
If your mesh looks like this, you can use a follow active quads mapping:
Select one face, u->reset. select linked, u->follow active quads, confirm, in 3D editor, probably followed by ctrl-p pack islands in UV editor.
If you make a mesh that makes a circle via a curve modifier, (or, on an actual curve object), without any generative modifiers after the curve modifier, you can use generated coordinates to follow the curve:
With a arbitrary topology, but curved only within a plane, you can use polar object coordinates:
A curve object automatically comes with a follow-active-quads styled UV mapping if you want.
UV and generated coord solutions are going to give you a high degree of distortion-- you’ll be able to see the triangulation of your mesh if you look closely enough. (How closely depends on the vert count.) The polar coordinates are nice, if you can use them, because they’re per-sample coordinates rather than interpolated, per-vertex coordinates.
My mesh is a circle, extruded. I tried the first method you said there, and it unwrapped it like this,
I don’t mind about distortion, it most likely won’t be noticeable because this is for an app, you won’t really be able to zoom in to it.
That’s exactly what you’d get for your mesh, if doing a follow-active-quads unwrap. The question is just whether you can do what you want with that mapping. Try it out.
All it does is follow the active quad, unwrapping each neighbor and stitching it, then doing that again for its newly unwrapped neighbors, etc. So you end up with a UV flow that’s the same as your topology flow.
Well it somewhat works, but it’s kinda wobbly? If that’s the right word for it, and there’s a very noticeable seam.
The seam is going to depend on your settings and your UV map. If you pack islands and use a default bricks texture, it won’t seam. If you want a different scaling, you’ll have to scale to eye to prevent seaming.
The wobbliness is probably the texture distortion I was talking about. If you want confirmation, give the mesh a triangulate modifier on fixed mode, then change it to fixed alternate mode. Does the wobbliness flip directions somehow? Then that’s because of the texture distortion.
I mentioned the distortion becomes more visible with fewer verts, but it also becomes more visible as the frequency in the texture goes up. As you make the bricks smaller and smaller, you’ll be more and more able to notice the distortion.
Okay, well I just increased the size in the mapping node and adjusted some other settings and it seems alright. Thanks for the help!
