@Erik-nottheviking - thanks for your nice message. I really really love Modo. I still think it has the best UI of any app (even though it is a bit watered down by now and has become a bit cluttered)
Concerning Non-UV-Mapping:
In Modo, whenever you create any texture (both image based and procedural) a texture locator is created - that is like Blenders option to choose an empty for placement.
So with
- A you can move, scale, rotate. So far so possible in Blender as well.
- B you can enable/disable that you can move the texture relative to the object. So if you have a moving object that moves 4 units in x you can animate the texture to move 2 units in x over the same time and the texture will move 2 units on the surface of the object, but stick to the Object
- C with World Coordinates the texture acts like a projector and you can just move your objects and the texture will be fixed in space and the objects will “slide” under the fixed texture
Then you can, with a single click, select all common projection types - and the ALL work for procedural textures as well.
And then you have all the controls for UV Based textures in a simple interface:
- A Slide the the texture space in U/V direction
- B Add Repetions to your UV texture space (Basically the Scale function, but a much neater Interface)
- C Linke in Blender you can choose the repetition type
- D Rotatet the UV space
- E Have random offset per item, or mesh island - perfect for example for wooden flooring where you have individual meshes for each floorboard
Most of this (probably all of this) IS possible in Blender. And for image based textures there is a lot of functionality in the Image Texture node. But it is not as intuitive (to me) and this is not available for procedural textures.
And to have a simple switch for World/Local Transforms/Coordinates switch would be really useful.
Now I DO KNOW that a lot of these issues are also me just learning Blender and not knowing my way around, but I have also been working with 3D software for 25 years and despite watching lots of tutorials on the subject, still find the blender approach pretty unintuitive. Maybe just an ÜBER-Mapping node would be needed, but currently this is an area that requires a lot of trial, error and tutorial for us.
Hope that makes sense.
Cheers,
Jonathan