Wave Texture Orientation - How might I fix it?

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi all, what seems like a relatively simple thing has perplexed me for a few days now.

I have been attempting to re-create something akin to the checker (or brick, with no offsets) texture using multiple wave textures.

My reasoning for this being that I wish to have utmost control over gradients for “tile” edges and mortar, and thus be able to create nice bumps.

Creating a simple checker texture, for a simple flat surface, is not a problem - simply working with one axis of rotation. The problem arises when I look at making the move to 3D space. The moment I step away from a flat plane and take a look at the results on a 3D object, it is apparent that my wave textures are skewed off at a rather odd angle, and I can’t work out the rotation(s) required to get them to simply follow an axis.

I have tried tweaking and aligning the 3 wave textures with their own individual mapping nodes to get the initial desired result, and that’s kinda ok… But if I want to get more complicated than simply lining things up at right-angles it becomes a royal pain in the behind :confused: lol.

Is there any way to have the initial wave texture just run along an axis, with no rotation(s) applied, or implied… I can’t for the life of me figure it out. :o

Blender v2.75. (vanilla, no addons/scripts enabled)
Cycles Renderer.

And yes, any and all objects I have tested with have had their rotation etc. applied!

2

I literally face-palmed after realizing what needed to be done.

Simply separate XYZ on the input vector, and use whichever axis is needed as the vector for the Wave Texture - the waves then follow the chosen axis.

Quicky node snapshot to help anyone else:

Wave_Texture_Orientation.jpg768×768 75.8 KB

3

Interesting. I had been wondering about the exact same thing.

4

Aw, God bless you, sir, I thought I’d have my brains facepalmed off with this “problem”.

5

Lovely fix! The solution is real but requires so much math it’s staggering. I spent the last two hours trying to criss-cross two wave textures only through the Z-axis and research showed something called a Rotation Matrix to calculate what appears to be a simple 45-degrees on three axis.

What’s really happening is rocket science. So, I’m deeply fond of this axis selection method.

What I’d like the developers to do is tell us what the rotations are because, you’re right, what seems so elementary can cause days of insanity!

EDIT -

separate wave rotation axis.jpg1600×900 216 KB

Two Mapping Nodes full of bizarro axis degrees taking a couple hours to research reduced to one, single Separate XYZ taking about 7-seconds to plug in. Palm to forehead indeed. Big thanks again!!! It pays to search the Forum.

6

If you really wanna know, the output is 0.5+0.5sin(10(X+Y+Z))
(plus distortions)

As the default coordinate system is ‘generated’ you’ll only get 45º if the bounding box is a perfect cube.