Mixing textures

[Jools]

Hi,

I am very new to Ventuz, but I am finding some of the procedures easy to do, except I am having some trouble controlling textures.


I am trying to texture this inhaler. I have used a Ambient Occupation UV map from C4D to give fake shadows on the device, and have also used 2D plastic texture to help give it some plastic reflections..

The trouble is that the plastic map, overpowers the shadow map, it and looks very fake looking, even though there are lights in the scene.

All I really need is for the plastic map to blend a little with the OA map so that it mixes a bit better. I have tried the blend modes in 'Add' 'Add Smooth' and also the custom settings in this dialogue box, but there is no opacity control.
I have been using a 16bit PNG texture and experimenting with a RGBA file with photoshop, IE using a extra channel. But as yet this does not work.

I noticed that there is shader panel, and low an behold a 'Texture Mixe'r node. I would guess it works by linking attributes into the texture? It appears, unintuitive as I see it at the moment.

Is there a tutorial available? The options I am currently using seem very restricted.

Best regards

Julian

[Karol]

Hi!

Could you post this small scene tree (as an archive VZA; File -> Export -> Scene Archive) so we can take a look on the texture shading settings.

Best Regards
Karol

[Chris]

Wow....texturing in Ventuz, in my experience a lot of trial and error methods were needed

Quick tips for you...

get rid of the lights.
get rid of the material node and replace it with a colour node. (if you dont put a colour node the model will still react to the Ventuz default light)
CTRL-A your red swirly texture for now, but keep it for experimenting later
Create a texture (512x512 is fine) in PS or whatever you are using....Black background, with some soft feathered white brush work in it. (some spot, some lines...get creative just not too much for now)
save the file (as a DDS if you can. PS has a plugin available from nvidia to do this)
Add it in as a new texture in your tree and set the mapping to sphere map. (this essentially fakes a bit of lighting, thats what real time is all about....backdoor methods )
Have a play with the settings for this new texture (texture modes-in the custom part is better, scaling, mapping-wrap, mirror etc, rotation etc etc)

you may come out with something a bit closer to what you are after

As Karol said, post up a scene archive and we can take a look

Happy texturing!!

Chris

[Chris]

In fact here you go a 10 second master piece .....png is fine for your tests

[Jools]

I have just realized I have had replies to this thread, I was expecting an email notification. My apologies:|

I did improve my render through trial and error. I found that duplicating the mesh with a plastic texture onto a different axis gave me a bit more control.
Also the custom bending modes helped. It is kind of hard to light this