I’m working on modeling a topological surface (similar to Boy’s Surface) for my University’s math department. I’ve laid out the surface in blender and am looking for the best way to present it. Many of the features are hidden by outside surfaces, so I’ve been playing around with transparencies and more recently with the “wire” setting on the render pipeline. Unfortunately there’s no hope of defining normals for this surface, so I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the texture (which is slightly metallic) appear uniform regardless of the local normal. Is there any way to do this without resorting to something like the “shadeless” setting?
Try using Texture type Blend, you have several directional options. You could then enhance that by placing an Empty inside the Mesh and in the MapInput tab in F5 change the Mapping from ORCO to Object and type in the Empty as the target. Moving, rotating or scaling the Empty will give you control of the mapping.
Even with no specularity the two “sides” show up differently , but I’d like to try to leave it in there anyways to preserve the metallic look. It turns out that the surface is orientable so I’ll be able to get rid of the seams, but I’m still trying to figure out how to get them to look the same.
I’m also still trying to figure out Fligh’s suggestion.
