HOW CAN I ELIMINATE SEAMS APPEARING IN MY TEXTURES?
Devashish Sarkark, India
Autodesk has come up with a genius mapping type that is well worth exploring if you are fed up with hard abrupt seams appearing in your textures. We’ve all been there haven’t we? This is a particular problem if your UV mapping skills are not quite up to scratch. Thankfully, Blended Box map is here to help to ‘hide’ those abrupt seams.
For most simple objects, you’ll no doubt make use of the UVW Box map. This is a brilliantly simple and easy-to-implement map. The problem comes when your object is more complex in terms of geometry and you don’t have the UV mapping skills to fix it. The Blended Box map works similarly to box mapping apart from the fact that it blends together the textures located at the seams. This creates a smoother falloff rather than hard edges.
Let’s delve a bit deeper and see how it works. Start by creating a standard material and plugging the Blended Box map into the diffuse slot. If you open the properties for the Blended Box map, you’ll see some rollouts. You’ll probably spend most of your time in the Parameters rollout of which the first setting is the Blend Amount. This controls the distance of blending that occurs between two projections at the seams. The higher this number, the greater the blend. You can also add a Blend map to control how the blend is mapped. For example, you could add a Noise map so that the blending has a random variation applied to it.
You will then want to set the number of projections: 1 will project the same texture on all six sides; 3 will utilise three textures and 6 will ensure that each projection side has a different texture. You can load either a colour or a map into these projection texture slots. There are also controls for customising the Projection so they are worth experimenting with.
For now, getting your head around the basics of how the map works would definitely be time well spent.