IFW2 Lightwave 7.0/7.5/8.0/8.5+ Procedural Textures

No Falloff

Spherical 1

Spherical 2

Spherical 3

Axes Section

Introduction

The Axes page allows control over the position and size of the texture as well as the current mapping type and falloff controls. The first thing to understand is the texture itself. All of the textures are based on a texture axis. The alignment and offset of the texture axis determines the orientation and position of the texture. By default the texture axis is placed at the pivot point of the object when it is saved. However, moving the pivot point in layout will not move the texture axis. The positioning and orientation of the texture is based on this point.

World Coords

By default all of the IFW2 textures use the object's local co-ordinate system. This means that the texture will stick to the object when it is moved, rotated or scaled. However, sometimes it is useful to use a world co-ordinate system. This means that the texture is centered on the world at 0,0,0. As the texture is effectively static when the object moves if will swim through the texture. This is useful for doing things like underwater lighting effects. Here a texture is applied to an object to make it look like is it lit with underwater caustic lighting. If this texture is applied using the world co-ordinate system then when the object moves it will appear to move through the texture maintaining the underwater lighting effect.

Ref. Object

The Ref. Object is a drop down list of all the objects in the current scene. When an object is selected then the texture will use the position, scale and rotation of that object and apply it to the current texture. In effect this allows the Ref. Object to become the texture axis. For example, if you add a NULL and use it as a Ref. Object when you move or rotate the NULL the texture will move and rotate accordingly. Similarly, when you scale the NULL the texture will also scale. A good use for this feature is in the positioning of texture. Say you wanted the of a drip drop pattern in a certain position. Simple add a NULL where you want the drop to land and use this as a Ref. Object. The drip drop center will now be exactly where you want it.

Axis

These three axis buttons select the controlling axis for the texture. Where a texture can be mapped planar, cylindrically, spherically or radially this control defines the axis of application. For planar mapping the texture is applied perpendicular to the selected axis. For spherical, cylindrical and radial mapping the texture is wrapped around the selected axis. For textures where the mapping selection is not available the axis selects how the texture is applied. For example, the axis along which a linear gradient runs or the direction of the flames for the firewall texture. Either way this controls allows the texture to be orientated to a particular axis where a texture has an orientation.

Mapping

This control allows the mapping of the texture to be selected. Some textures, like fBm, are inherently three dimensional and do not require any mapping. However, textures like brick are two dimension and are required to be wrapped to the object. There are five potential wrapping methods: Planar is simply flat mapping to two axis, cubic mapping attempts to map the texture into 3D, cylindrically mapping is simply wrapping the texture around the object, spherical mapping does the same but also wraps the textures at the poles and radial mapping maps the texture around a point, radially. With some textures they cannot be mapped in a cubic mode even though that mode can be selected. Here the texture will simply be mapped in a planar fashion. All of the mapping modes are shown below:

**Different Mapping Modes**

Planar	Cubic	Cylindrical	Spherical	Radial

Scaling

These controls allow the texture to be scaled independently in any direction. For the majority of the texture mapping modes these are simple linear scaling. However, for cylindrical, spherical and radial mapping they are slightly different. The scaling works the same for the axis around which the texture is mapped so scaling Y in a texture wrapped around Y axis will simply scale the texture is that direction. The two other scaling values control the scale around the mapping. The scale around the mapping determines many times the texture repeats around the object. The easiest way to understand how this works is to start by setting the two scaling values opposite to the axis around which the texture is being mapped to 1. The means that the texture will wrap once around the object. If you set one of the values to 0.5 the texture will repeat twice and so 0.25 will repeat four times. The important thing to bear in mind is that the number times the texture repeats is one divided by the two scaling values multiplied to together. So setting them both to 0.25 gives a repeat of 16, (1 over 0.25 * 0.25 ). Also, if the repeat value is not a whole number then there is the possibility of getting a seam as you may get a partial feature of the texture.

Center

These controls allow the texture to be moved based on the texture center. The texture center is the world center when using the world co-ordinates system and the object's pivot point when using the local texture co-ordinates system.

Rotation

These controls the texture to be rotated around any of the axes. The rotation are all based on the original texture axes which means that if you tilted the texture around one axis and then rotated around another you may expect it to spin around the tilted axis. However, the texture would rotate around the original texture axis and not the newly tilted one.

Falloff

The falloff controls allow a texture to be blended with the underlying surface in one of three ways, Cubically, Linearly or Spherically. When enabled, the texture is faded out based on the current falloff method and the amount of falloff specified. The falloff is specified as a percentage falloff per meter. So, requesting 100% falloff ensures that the texture will have completely faded out after 1 meter. So 200% fades in 0.5 meter and 50% faded in 2 meters and so on. The cubic falloff fades the texture in all three axis and in both direction, the linear fall-offs only fades in the positive direction for the selected axis and the spherical falloff fades in all axes but spherically. Examples of the falloff can be seen below: