Distorted planar mapping

# 1 14-11-2013 , 05:04 PM

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I'm having a strange issue with a project I'm working on and would appreciate any advice from the SimplyMaya community.

I'm trying to create a series of posters for a shop window I'm making. I don't want to create a separate material for each of them so I've created poly planes of roughly the right dimensions for each bit of artwork and I've planar mapped each of them and arranged them in the UV Editor so they're not overlapping. I've exported a UV snapshot and created a texture in Photoshop with the artwork for each poster in the corresponding position. When I apply the texture all the images appear as I would expect, except that they all show very pronounced lens-type distortion. The closer to the edges the worse the distortion.

Has anyone got any idea what's going on here?

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# 2 14-11-2013 , 07:42 PM

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Strange... Do you have an image of the texture and viewport? Does it do the same thing when rendered?

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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# 3 15-11-2013 , 03:39 PM

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This is the texture: https://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/819/lo61.jpg/
and this is a render https://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/708/qqi1.jpg/

I'm not sending you an image of the viewport as the texture is showing at all! This is another (in my opinion unrelated issue) either a bug in Maya 2011 or due to my not having a very high spec graphics card.

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# 4 15-11-2013 , 05:36 PM

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Hi,

are you subdividing the planes? Is so you may need to add additional edge loops to prevent this kind of distortion,

gubar

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# 5 15-11-2013 , 09:44 PM

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It could be that you're using smooth preview. There are options in the object's shape tab under smooth mesh|Extra controls that could help with the border distortion.

Also, you don't need to create nearly identical shaders for each object, you could just use a switch node.

Using a Triple Switch - YouTube

- Genny
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# 6 18-11-2013 , 11:58 AM

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Thanks so much for your ideas. Gen, I think you nailed it. I selected the objects and hit 1 on the keyboard and the textures are now displaying correctly. The tutorial on the triple switch was really useful too. The name suggests it's limited to three-way switching. Is it?

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# 7 18-11-2013 , 06:34 PM

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Unfortunately it appears that the Triple Switch doesn't work with mia materials.

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# 8 18-11-2013 , 10:00 PM

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Ah yes the mia_material, there seems to be some support issues with that part. Assign a lambert or some other standard Maya shader to the surfaces first, then load the the surfaces into the switch as normal, after that you can plug the switch into the mia and keep going.

The triple switch can be used to control any given number of objects. The "triple" refers to the number of channels it handles, like xyz values or in the case of color, rgb values. For a reflectivity attribute, the single switch would be more suitable.

- Genny
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# 9 19-11-2013 , 11:51 AM

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Thanks so much for the advice. I'll give it a shot. I've already got way to many materials in this scene - wish I'd known about the triple switch before!

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Distorted planar mapping

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