Hi, I’m Vee, a new guy on the site. I’m not much of a programmer but a modeler. I’m currently doing a racing game project where I have a large race course map that has multiple levels of height (i.e, first story, second story etc). I’m doing the model in Maya and have been exporting them as eggs for my programmers. The problem now is that the texturing method I used in Maya to help properly texture the multi floor race course is not readable as an egg.
The method I’m using is called Tri-Planar projection, which if I’m not mistaken, is similar to the Cube Mapping in Panda3d. I’m currently at a lost as normal texturing methods would not be able to scale correctly to the multiple levels and re-texturing the objects manually would make the file size bigger than the expected size of the project.
If anyone knows how to get the projection to be readable in .egg or any other methods that can solve the problem, I would be very grateful to hear them.
The maya2egg converter can convert any texture projection that is applied to the vertex UV coordinates. I don’t have any experience with Tri-Planar projection, but doesn’t it work by computing UV coordinates? If not, why not? Does it have a mode where it can be assigned to the UV coordinates?
Well, a normal planar projection works by taking an image and projecting it onto a surface, kind of like a projector displaying images on a wall. Tri-planar is exactly as it sounds, three planar projection of an image on the x,y,z axis. It basically wraps whatever plane it is assigned to into a cuboid projection of the image. So, for example, if you project a image onto a cube, all six sides of the cube will have the same image. This is especially useful when it comes to modelling objects where the floor and adjoining wall is of a the texture and needs to flow.
Here’s an image of how a planar projection looks like.
Notice how the image is stretched on the y and z axis and only the x axis has the full clear image.
A triplanar on the other hand…
it projects the image on all axis. The projection method also made it so that the image flows from one axis to the next almost perfectly, which is what I am trying to achieve with my current model.
As the maya2egg plugin is installed on the my teammates computer, I cannot at this time confirm what was the exact error shown during conversion. However, I remember the error specifically targeting the tri-planar projection as the cause, signalling it as an unknown.
Note: The actual name of the projection is ‘triplanar’, without the dash and it shows it as such on maya and the .egg converter. I just use Tri-planar cause that’s how I was taught.
It doesn’t really work that way. From the forum post you sourced, this gmask character has the right idea. I did some digging and apparently projection mapping merely projects an image onto an object but doesn’t really have UV points of the image. What I want to do here is to imprint the projected image into the UV or at the very least, find a way to get the same effect in a way that will work in Panda.
