Hi,
as per the title, what’s the best way for this? i have a motorbike w/ a few control cables which i want a kinda herringbone texture on like it’s one of those flexymetal type cables. was thinking of a tileable texture but i had a it play last night and couldn’t get it to work. don’t know if unwrapping will work well as it would be a massive long and narrow map.
TIA
Build the cables as suggested, using lofted curves to which a nice, tileable 2D texture is applied. (Steal the one from that other thread!) But also consider if a nice procedural (Voroni?) texture will do just as well. Map the texture in the local coordinate space of the cable curve so that it will follow it. I’m not sure that actual UV-mapping and unwrapping will be needed here, because the texture will just follow the UV-coordinates of the object and be repeated endlessly.
Sweet thanks. the cables are geometry, i laid them out in curves and Alt+C’d them
“Map the texture in the local coordinate space of the cable curve so that it will follow it” not sure about this point as i’ve done nothing but simple curve things, how do i do it?
thanks bud, i’ll have a bit experiment.
well i’m trying that texture from the link, using a Curve, i’ve marked the UV stuff but my cable’s just black despite the Material looking correct on the preview orb, what am i missing?
My link?
Just tried it here and it works fine… Please show us your test file!
Did you change anything in the node setup?
If I download the file “Diagonal Weave Curve.zip” in the post I linked you to, the node group for the “Diagonal Weave 2” material deviates from the one in your file.
This is the Curve_throttle_cable_1 object from your file, but with the material from the original download (and some minor scaling tweaks):
not as far as i’m aware. i did try copying the teture into my bike file and it didn’t work, so instead i imported the cable into your diagonal weave 2 file and applied the texture there, and still couldn’t get it to work. i wondered if it was a scale issue, as your pipe is massive compared to my cable.
Well, that’s not exactly “my” cable, as I did not create the file, but anyway:
The top image shows the “Diagonal Weave 2” node group from the post I linked to, the bottom one is the node setup in your file. See how they differ? Who made those changes - if not you?
When using the original material on “your” cable, I get the desired result (see my last post). So, some of the changes made to that material seem to spoil things up.
thanks for the investigations and info. in the meantime i’ve been going back to the mesh unwraps and stumbled upon some benefits in that when i unwrap and scale the UVs way up, they still texture even when off the square of the map; the last stuff i fumbled at (making ships for a game called Oolite) if your UVs were off the map, they didn’t get textured.
anyhoo, there’s another odd issue. i took the maps and used Photoshop to create tileable textures - and in Blender, they aren’t tiling :-/
as you can see on the cable, that ring of faces should be tiled, but where the unwrap seam in, top and bottom of the UV strip, it’s not placing the texture correctly. i was a little out on my selection in PS but the gap on the cable is well out.
Seamless textures is not the point here.
On the contrary, we could build a blender UV based workaround to produce seamless textures you know.
To place the UVs correctly on your texture isn’t that hard.
Just grabbed your texture from the posted image, testing that’s OK
The seams (from this view angle) could be visible but they aren’t
point is if it matches the UVs but doesn’t show correctly in 3D, what’s going wrong?
