heyas; okay, i don't get this. i wanted to project an image onto a terrain (it was a 1001 rug pic i was using as a texture). so, i make my terrain the way i want, and i apply the image as the colour channel. no mirroring or stuff, automatic or flat mapping... and when i render, i get a buncha tiled images of my rug marching across the terrain. is there an arcane way to explain to vue that i want the image to appear exactly ONE time? and that i want the upper left hand corner to be on the object's... well, upper left hand corner! because of course if i made the texture scale 8, i got one rug onto my terrain, but the edges of the picture made a cross in the middle of the rug somewhere. eventually i managed to use the x and y offset thingies to get the fool thing lined up, but what a pain! what's the trick to this??

Hi Bloodsong, Try setting the scale of the texture to 3. This is what I do when I use a fractal image following Mike and Katherine's technique, and for some reason, 3 seems to be the magic number. It applies the image to the terrain just once, corner to corner. :) Varian -- Treasures d'Esprit http://www.varian.net/dreamview/dreamtools/vue/

3, huh?? i'll try that! what's mike and katharine's technique? is that on the web? i tried it before with lon chaney's bryce wave creation tutorial, but got frustrated with it. actually, with that, the texture also applied itself in mirror image mode. that was annoying too :/ thanks, varian!

Goodness...I must have forgotten not everyone knows everyone else out here. Shame on me! Mike Morris and Katherine Auton are the artistic team I was referring to, and you can see their (amazing -- honest!) fractal/Vue d'Esprit work at their website here: http://www.morris60.freeserve.co.uk/website I don't think the technique is published on their site, but Mike explained the details for the Vue d'Esprit e-mail list about two months ago, so you could do a search for it at the E-groups.com/vuedeesprit message archives and probably locate it easily enough. (Search on "fractal" because that term doesn't come up very often, so it should lead you right to it.) (For those who don't know about the e-mail list, head on over to: http://www.egroups.com/group/vuedeesprit/ for more info and/or to join up!) I have no idea why a scale of 3 is needed for this. Logic would suggest a 1:1, but as you've discovered, that just doesn't do it. Mike and Katherine had to do a lot of experimenting before they discovered 3, and it sure does the job. :) Okay, now I've made amends for my earlier lax! :) Have fun!

heyas; thanks for the info there, varian! i saw that they said they couldn't do 'object space,' version materials, so i went to mess around with it some more... this is what i have discovered: when you place your image texture on a terrain (w/o checking object space), it places the picture in the middle, within a 3x3 grid of the picture. so, making the scale 3 makes the center tile take up the whole terrain. now, when you change it to object space mode, you still get a 3x3 tile, BUT instead of the center of the tile being in the center of your terrain, the upper left corner is now the center. what you need to do is set the x and y offset to 1/2 of the pixel size of the image. (ie: a 100x200 image should be offset 50x100.) then do the 3x scaling, and the 180 rolling thing. now, if you want to stretch your terrain, the texture doesn't stretch with it. BUT... if you use the numerical size window, you can type in (or just read) the x and y size of your terrain. then go into the texture and stretch it similarly on the x and/or y scale. for example, if you scale the terrain so it is 1x2(x whatever z is), then go into the texture and set the x scaling so it is 1 (the default) and the y is 2. or whatever you change it to. wohoo! :)

Kewl, Bloodsong! Glad you discovered the "trick" behind it, and thanks for reporting your findings! All I know is that you can create some very neat things using an image to create the terrain itself and then also apply the image as the texture to that terrain. :)

Hi Bloodsong, Pleased that you've managed to work out our somewhat convoluted technique for getting pictures to map onto terrains:) We just did it by trial and error basically... I don't know WHY it works like that! But it certainly sounds as though it should be possible to scale the terrains numerically doing it your way; we didn't really go any further because once we'd got a fractal mapped onto the terrain all we had to do was position the camera. Mike and Katherine

heyas; hi mike and katherine! :) yes, i've done the trial and error thing, too, but it was just too annoying. so thought i'd take a look and figure out what was going on. thanks for posting the info and stuff at the egroups/one list deal!

Is the terrain flat? I just use a plane for the carpet, map it by checking the object space box inside the material editor, map the texture as "Flat" (it defaults to "Automatic"), and applying a transmap for the fringe that I created in Photoshop and make sure that the material size is 1.00. That's all there is to it. The resulting carpet LOOKS like a carpet. Ta ta, Laurie

heyas; no, the terrain isn't flat. i wanted a rumpled carpet. :) i tried flat vs automatic but that didn't seem to change anything for the terrain :/

Terrains and primitives (like the plane object) accept texture very differently. The scale of 1 works for the primitive, but a terrain needs a scale of 3. It is just one of those mysteries of the universe! :) Varian

Oh yeah, you did say terrain, didn't you? Silly me! :) My brain was asleep yesterday....LOL. Ta ta, Laurie