MAYA - Texture Deformer issues

r3Dmond

Hello everyone,

Lately I've experimented with the texture deformer functionality in Maya and I'm getting interesting results. My main goal is to procedurally generate rocks within Maya and I'm using various procedural noise textures layered together to obtain the shapes I'm looking for and in particular I'm using mostly the simplex noise node to generate a cellular texutre which I'm using as the base.

My problem here is that the simplex noise node won't project properly onto my meshes. I'm using a triplanar node for the texture but no matter what I do I get a simple planar projection, which is no good at all for my purposes.

I tried troubleshooting the problem as best as I could but I'm left scratching my head. As far as I can tell the projection node and the noise node work fine together; if I plug them into the color attribute of my base material I get the type of projection that I'm looking for, but if I plug the same node structure in the deformer I only get a planar projection.

I'd appreciate any help

Posting some images for clarity:

oglu

Have you tried to set the texturedeformer to normals instead of projection?

And there is iDisplace from Ingo. Give it a try.
http://www.braverabbit.com/ideform/

r3Dmond

Yes, I've tried. But if I plug the simplex noise directly into the defomer nothing happens. If, instead, I plug into it the volume noise though (which I think comes with it's own triplanar mapping) it works flawlessly, no additional projection node needed.

I kept on testing and as far as I can't tell there seems to be some sort of incompatibility between the triplanar node and the texture deformer.

This really bums me out.

I might try iDisplace, but I was really hoping to be able to do all of this with Maya's own toolset. Thank you for the help.

I'm still open to other suggestions though, if anyone has some. In the meantime I'll try the plugin.

throttlekitty

@r3Dmond , it seems that textureDeformer checks incoming projection type. I noticed that if I had it set to UV space and connected a triplanar mode projection, it flips over to Local. Trying to swap back to UV mode after that nets the error:

// Error: textureDeformer3 (Texture Deformer): The texture node 'projection4' does not support UV space. //

It also seems that Maya also doesn't like it when you go TriPlanar out > remapHSV > textureDeformer either, so no dice there. You could maybe bake out the comped textures with Turtle, but that would be annoying in your case.

I was able to build my own using three planar projection nodes and combined them in a layeredTexture. In my case, I just reused the same noise node subtracted in series. Arguably less fun or helpful for a typical use, but should still work for a rock generator.

Side note, I think I misunderstand how Maya sends color across nodes. I ran into similar issues with Redshift's triplanar a while back, where I couldn't use the output as straight color data like you're experiencing here.

r3Dmond

throttlekitty said:

@r3Dmond , it seems that textureDeformer checks incoming projection type. I noticed that if I had it set to UV space and connected a triplanar mode projection, it flips over to Local. Trying to swap back to UV mode after that nets the error:

// Error: textureDeformer3 (Texture Deformer): The texture node 'projection4' does not support UV space. //

It also seems that Maya also doesn't like it when you go TriPlanar out > remapHSV > textureDeformer either, so no dice there. You could maybe bake out the comped textures with Turtle, but that would be annoying in your case.

I was able to build my own using three planar projection nodes and combined them in a layeredTexture. In my case, I just reused the same noise node subtracted in series. Arguably less fun or helpful for a typical use, but should still work for a rock generator.

Side note, I think I misunderstand how Maya sends color across nodes. I ran into similar issues with Redshift's triplanar a while back, where I couldn't use the output as straight color data like you're experiencing here.

We had the same idea, I was planning to try the three planar projection thing next. Thank you for taking the time to answer in such detail, I really appreciate it.

I love Maya but it's too bad it doesn't really lend itself to this type of workflow, or at least not without some prior node magic. Again, thank you for the help and a have a good day.