Presagis

I had this problem once before and now it’s here again so thought I’d ask.

Some textures…no different then any other texture attributes all the same when selected to be used in the texture compositer seem to force it to only composit images in a single column.  If I deselect them all is good and happy in the world and I can pack the texture however I see fit.  Any reason why?  bug?

Hi Tarnis,

The texture compositor looks at the textures and the geometry to determine if these textures tile. If a texture tiles, and you want to composite a tiling texture, then it must make sure that the tiling texture’s edges in the tile direction touch the edges of the composite texture.

The problem you are seeing, is the tool thinks that one of your textures tiles, when you do not. I would look at the uvs for the polygons that use each of those textures and make sure that they do not go out of the 0-1 range. It could be that one of the polygons mapped with that texture just barely is out of range (ie 1.0001 instead of 1, or -0.00001 instead of 0).  It could also be that one of the textures is mapped completely out of range. (ie 1-2 instead of 0-1).

A quick way to figure this out is to select all polygons that have each of the textures one set a a time, and look at the uvs in the uv editor.  (ignore the textures that are smaller in width than the widest one, because that can’t be the one that tiles)  To do this, deselect all polygons. Then select the image in question from the texture palette. Then run the select similar texture from the select menu. This will select all polygons that use that texture.  Now you can run the uv editor, and see where all your polygons are mapped.  Make sure you normalize all polygons so they are in the 0-1 range, then zoom in on the corners to make sure they do not exceed the 0-1 boundary.  Then just repeat this until you find the offending texture.

Or go into vertex mode, and search for vertices with values of U < -.000001 or > 1.000001, then values of V < -.000001 or > 1.000001;I do this for large groups of buildings with hundreds of textures.  This is why it would be good to save attribute searches so you could just load this one up when you want to use it!

Quick note on Kent’s last post. This works well if your texture coordinates are normalized.  However it may find some “false negatives” if your texture coordinates are NOT normalized.  For example, a polygon whose U value spans from 1.0 to 2.0 is composite-able (even though the values are greater than 1.0) as it does not repeat.  If you do find non-normalized UV values, Creator has a couple tools help.  Normalize UVs and Modify UVs.  Both can help you “normalize” your texture coordinates.  Note that Texture Compositor handles non-normalized texture coordinates fine, btw.

Thanks Steve - I didn’t know about the non-normal textures.  You learn something new every day!

A savable “attribute search” would be darn nice to have, though.  I’ve got sort of standard sets I use all the time, but have to type them in every new session.

Oh - and by the way, using this forum reminds me a bit of when I used to use a Tektronix worksation to process data for the CompuScene IV.  I’ll click on a topic, check my e-mail, get some coffee, come back, and it may have actually gotten there…...