Week 6 Class Practical: Part 3 - Moth Mapping

The next part of this weeks class practical involves a small exercise around projecting a moth texture onto a sphere and a cube using the 3 different projection methods covered in the last blog post and observing how the texture is applied to these shapes. To begin I created a sphere and applied the moth texture to it using normal mapping.

As shown in the images above, Maya attempts to wrap the moth picture around the sphere, encasing it completely. It does this by creating a visible "seam" in the texture where the edges meet and wraps the rest of the image around the object. Next I created a second sphere, applied the same moth texture to it and then changed the projection mapping type of both of the objects, one to cylindrical and one to spherical.

Both projection types duplicate the image on the front and back of the sphere, but the spherical mapping (on the right) attempts to add the texture to the top and bottom also, probably because of the difference between the flat top of a cylinder and the rounded top of a sphere. In this example, the cylindrical mapping actually produces a better result for this texture than the spherical mapping for this texture. 

Projection maps can be applied to specific faces only which is incredibly handy when trying to texture more complex objects with multiple textures. In the image below I created a cube and applied the moth image to only the front face. This is achieved by selecting just the front face and then assigning a new material to that face. In order to get this texture to actually show up I had to apply the "Planar" UV projection type to the front face and then edit the projection parameters