Smooth instancing texturing

Beginners
1

Hi,
I have this setup.
It’s 3d scene, with instanced boxes on a grid. Four camers are located in center to get 360 video (it will be file recorded animation, so preformance is not needed). I’m using TOP (in this example ramp TOP) to manipulate Y position of boxes. TOPs will be still images, I will add CHOPS (like small noise) and Animation COMP to add movement. But I can handle all of that.

What I want to do, and I can’t even grasp the idea of, is texturing. I would like to add dynamic normal map (bump mapping), and color map to each box (it will be external noise movies). They don’t need to be different for each cube, but at least so many of them that every cube wouldn’t look the same.

I know I could use Texture 3D TOP but then animation is not smooth. With 60 images it’s one box change per second. I also tried adding textures different ways (but again, I can’t grasp idea of texturing in TD- it was more like blind trying), but usualy on longer side of cube textures were streached. I found Boxmap toe here on forum that allowed me to apply modified textures to each side of cube that they fit and were smooth but all cubes had same textures.

Can anyone help me how can I do it? Maybe different approach?

Sincerely
Rafał
boxes.toe (6.6 KB)

2

Hi Fundak,

A texture 3D can be “played” back as long as you’ve set up the texture to be a proper 3D texture and not a 2D array. Take a look at this example to see how you can “play” a texture3D by providing a dynamic w coordinate.
base_texture3d.tox (2.94 KB)

The movement here is slow, but if you turn the speed CHOP up to 1 you’ll move at a regular speed through the cached texture. A technique like this one could let you use the same cached noise, but offset the starting point - making it look unique for each instance.

Hope that gives you some ideas.

3

Hi,
Thank you very much. It works perfectly. Both for normal and color maps. I only used mix of fan out and math CHOPS to create more channels, so I wouldn’t have to make them by hand :smiley:.

Sincerely
Rafał