This is a bit of a peculiar problem here but i was hoping maybe someone could help me out. I’m modeling a PRR T1 locomotive, down to the frame and boiler as a highres model, and i was hoping to mix up the texture on the boiler’s rivets and staybolts. As you can see there’s a hell of a lot of them, and having them all have similar looking textures at first glance would look pretty crap
Anyway, i’ve got the rivets holding the sheets together down, by mapping two rivets and using Spin to duplicate them 104 times according to the blueprints but that means the tex coordinates are obviously identical
i tried fixing that by splitting to parts, origin to geometry for each piece and using randomize transformations to rotate randomly along Z axis, but the origin still has the world’s Z axis so instead of rotating the rivets nicely along their proper axis, it just turns into a wobbly mess and looks awful.
The only ways i can think of to get around it is to duplicate two rivets with proper transforms, duplicate and rotate around the boiler by 3.46 degrees 104 ties and then randomize transforms, but that’s a hell of a lot of work. The other way i can think of, which i don’t even know is possible is to somehow set up a group of rivet objects at origin and use an array/curve like system that samples from the pool of rivets and randomizes Z rotation to truely mix up the texture space, but like i said, i don’t even know if that’s possible and i can’t find anyone who’s done anything similar.