Hey all,

I wanted to use the Toon Nation Eye shader on a simple bit of geometry -- just five CPs. However, when I do so the size of the texture is *humongous* -- like, all I get is flat color on my patches.

Lemme show you with an image:



My question: is there an easy, *visual* way to adjust the mapping coordinates on these patches, or at least a way to set the texture origin to a bone or Null?

Thanks in advance.

I'm not sure if this is your problem:

You have to scale the whole material. (Highlight the material name and go to it's properties). Before scaling, you'll probably have to translate the material pivot point to the same pivot point as your "5 cps". At the moment, the material pivot point is the origin.

http://johnl.inform.net/pages/toon.swf.html

Oho... that pivot point thing was what I needed. Thank you both! ^_^ Surprising that there isn't an option to make materials center on the pivot of their parent group, although I can understand why it's done this way-- you get pretty much free infinite material variety without having to set stone pivot origins for, say, a thousand bricks. However, the pivots I set got erased when I copied and pasted the model. It'd be really nice to be able to lock those pivots to their parent groups.

Behold! The eyes of doom!

[attachmentid=18507]

... Now, this leads me to two more questions.

- My eyes were naturally squashed along the x axis, such that to get them to scale properly I had to set x to 35% and y to 20%. (This is odd to me because the pupils are perfect circles.) That stretching fixes the outer edge, but stretches the iris in the unseemly manner you see above... What's the next step I should take to fix that? I'm attaching a model so that you can see if I borked some other settings, just in case. ^_^;

- Since texture pivots aren't set to the groups to which they're attached, how does this work once I start animating? Do displacements like bones not move texture positions? And is there a better "initial" placement for flat model parts that need specific texture coordinates?

It would be nice to have a visual and interactive representation of the Material for placement and scale, wouldn't it?

I wonder why we don't have that?

- pjc

Well for the scale I can understand. Since procedurals by definition have no actual boundaries, any visual indicator of scale would either be totally bogus or need to be based on the bounding box extents of the group to which they're attached. That box could end up quite small, and scaling it could be tricky.

Pivots are a different story, but hey, whatever, right? My eyes have irises. ^o^/

Your model is at a 45 degree angle to the x axis. These materials are projected onto the model. That's why your eye is deformed.....the screen (model) isn't straight up.

Animating doesn't change the materials position in the model window. So, you don't have to worry about it.

Hey, are those eyes on a car? If they are, I would like to see the whole model if you could post a picture of it! To me, it just kind of reminded me of the movie Cars, so that's what I first thought of.

@KenH: Thanks again, that fixed it. Next trick is figuring out how to move them about.



I'll be posting full, proper shots of the model a little later. I'm still working through a lot of what I want to do with it, and I only like posting when I reach milestones. I do have a WIP thread -- you can visit me there if you like, although in that thread the car looks mostly like a normal car.

Hey, that's looking good!