Welcome! !!
'UV Band Mapper v0.3' is a Modeler LScript for Lightwave3D v7b.
NOTE:
I've
updated theis LScript with a MAJOR feature, 'seamless scaling'. I didn't think
this would be an easy thing to incorporate, but 1 pack of cigarettes, 5 cups
of tea, and a sleepless night later...here we are :)
It came about because I was experimenting with a low poly race track for a game
and I
wanted to UV tile my road texture map along it. Not an easy task to do on a
twisty, looping road!
It has some limitations (ONLY works on a strip of continuous Quads at a time!),
but should help you out a bit.
Here's a quick run down of how to use it:
Step
1:
Create
your Road, Track or whatever (NOTE: ONLY use Quads!).
Or select a 'band' of Quad polys on your mesh and Hide the rest of it for now!.
The LScript will only work with continuous polys (end to end) as in the picture
below. Although it doesn't have to be looped back on itself as the track in
the picture does.
Step
2:
Unweld
all the points.
Step
3:
Select a single
Poly from your mesh, idealy one that is of the same orientation as your texture
for conveniance, although it doesn't really matter.
Now 'Create NEW UV Texture'.
Call it whatever you like. Make it 'Planar' mapping, and in this case we will
use the 'Y' axis
Step
4:
Invert your selection,
then 'Make UV's' and select your 'Texture_UV' as the UV Map for them to be added
to. This time the Mapping Axis doesn't matter, but I left it at Y anyway.
Step
5:
Assign ALL your Polys a Surface
name, then in Surface Editor apply the 'Road2_256' bitmap to the Color channel,
using UV Projection, and 'Texture_UV' as your UV map.
Step
6:
As
you can see, because we created the UV's for our First Poly by itself, it appears
bigger than the others in the UV window.
When you first run the LScript,
each of the 4 points of this Poly have the option to be 'Snapped' to their nearest
corner! so as long as the Top Left Point is in the Top Left quarter of the UV
window, and the others are in their respective quarters of the UV window, then
all will go well.
In this case, we do NOT want
the TOP points to be snapped, as we want to adjsut the UV's to squash the road
texture a bit, so we'll turn off snapping in the plugin interface for the TOP
2 points.If you don't want to use the Snap feature on any points, then you should
manualy align them nicely.
Step
7:
Now,
select in a CLOCKWISE direction, the Top Left, Top Right, Bottom Right, Bottom
Left points of our First Polygon, as seen in the picture below.
Step
8:
Say 'F*** yeah!' then
just Merge Points and carry on editing!
Things to note!: After
the plugin has finished, if your 'track' or whatever is looped, you might notice
a seam between the first polygon we selected, and the previous (last to be processed)
polygon. Because I changed the way the UV's are managed, you can simply select
ALL the polygons in the UV Window, zoom in close to the very bottom (where 'V'
= 0%) and use the scale tool. You'll be able to very slightly stretch the UV's
so that the 'seam' dissappears!!!
The other thing is that,
although this plugin will tile and keep the scale of your UV's amongst different
lengths of Polygon, as soon as you go into SubPatch mode, you may see a little
stretching. If that's the case then try Knifing some of the larger polygons
before SubPatching / Freezing the mesh.
