working on a spherical object to make an eyeball. My problem is that with the procedural textures’ default sizings, I need to have a ball about one hundred times too big for my model. I need to find a way to straightforwardly resize all of the textures to be much smaller. This is in theory possible by changing sizeX, Y and Z in the map input for each of the five textures in the material. This is almost unworkable because it is so much manual changing each time I want to tweak the size. My problem is made more difficult by the fact that I can’t find any way to preview if the size parameters are correct without rendering the whole scene. Changing 5*3=15 values manually and then rendering every time I want to tweak it isn’t working - is there another way? I am quite inexperienced so feel free to talk down to me!
By the way, I have tried pressing T to alter the texture space. Nothing I do to the cube actually makes any difference to the size of the rendered textures for some reason.
As far as I know, there isn’t a way to alter the size of procedural textures aside from the way you described.
As far as seeing the result without rendering the scene, blender has a nifty preview render tool. You can use it from the camera view, or in the edit view at any time by pressing SHIFT+P. You can just move your view right up to the eyeball and change values while watching the result change in real time (the preview render window re-renders whenever something in the scene changes).
I think you should use UVMapping instead of the OrcoMapping.
This gives the most control over the textures coordinates and makes it easier to reuse the eye later in other scenes and sizes.
I don’t know if you’re experienced with UVMapping.
If you want to try this, you have to unwrap your model first.
You can resize procedural(and image) textures by mapping to an object.
Add an Empty and in the object’s Map Input panel choose Object instead of Orco and enter the name of the empty. Now whatever you do to the Empty - Scale, Rotate, Move - will also happen to the texture.
Thanks for all your ideas folks. The preview window was particularly useful, I didn’t know about that. Mapping to an empty doesn’t seem to work for this kind of procedural texture - the resizing works but the pupil inside iris inside white doesn’t come out right, as if there is no central point or something. I think I’m going to try and do it without procedural textures, it seems to be more trouble than it’s worth for a relative newbie like me.