This pluggin is what I define as charityware and can be freely distributed. If
you find it useful make what you feel as an appropriate donation to your
favorite charity. You cannot charge or make any money from this routine by
reselling or bundling them with another package/cd/web page without my
permission.
To install this routine just copy the files into your 3ds Max plugin directory.
This modifier is a very simple mapping modifier. All it does is copy the
position of each vertex into the the corresponding texture vertex in the
selected channel. You are probably wondering why you would want to do this and
the reason is simple it allows you to lock down 3d textures to object even when
the objects shape is changing. When you use a 3d Texture such as Noise or
Cellular you have 2 options for applying it to the object either using the XYZ
option which uses the objects vertices or UVW1/2 which uses the objects UVW
mapping coordinates. Both of these have draw backs. If you use XYZ you get a
nice smooth map with no breaks, but if you apply an animated bend you will
notice now that your object seems to swim through the texture. If you use the
UVW the texture is locked to the object but now you are limited to some sort of
UVW mapping which can cause stretching and distortion or a non tileable
surface. Vertex to UVW Map Modifier fixes both these problems. All you need to
do is apply the Vertex to UVW Map Modifier at the bottom of the stack before
any animated modifier, and then have the 3d Texture use the UVW1/2 channel and
you will get the exact same output as the XYZ but it will be locked to the
vertices.
To see an example load the TV06.MAX file and examine the 3 cylinders. Notice
the middle cylinder just uses normal UVW mapping with a cellular material with
the UVW1/2 cannel which looks fine on the side but on the top it is bad. This
is because you are using one projection for the top and side uses a different
projection so you get different looking textures. The cylinder on the right
used XYZ in the cellular material it looks fine until you render an animation
that causes it to change shape and then it looks like the cylinder is swimming
through the texture. Notice how the the texture on the top of the cylinder has
changed as it is bent. The cylinder on the left use the Vertex To UVW Map with
cellular material using the UVW channel. Notice how consitent the texture is
and notice that it stays locked to the cylinder as it bends.
Note the only draw backs are that you loose a UVW channel and if you want to
see the sample sphere in the material editor render correctly you need to
temporarily set it to XYZ and then set it back to UVW when you do a real
render.
This modifier works great in conjunction with displace and is very useful for
using noise or cellular as texture across an animated skin of a creature.
Note this utility has not been fully tested in a production enviroment so use
at your own risk. If you encounter any problems please contact me at