Hey everyone.

Many of you have been using my BlendedBoxMap script for your work. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s basically a box mapping that has blended edges, which allows you to quickly splat a texture onto a lot of surfaces with no seams. I use it to do the majority of my texture work. Anyways, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve made a major overhaul of the technique thanks to Markus Boos who has written the CameraMapGemini plugin.

The main problems with my old technique were:

- The mapping modifiers are attached to each individual object. So if you move one of your objects, the mapping modifiers will become misaligned.
- Your objects need to have their transforms reset in order to get the falloff maps to align properly with the world (this is done using the Reset XForm utility in max). This is especially bad if you want to keep your original transforms on the objects.
- Adding a new object to your mapping requires copying and pasting three separate mapping modifiers, and in the process of pasting them, again, they may become misaligned.

So since then, Markus Boos has written a proper Camera Map plugin http://www.projectgemini.net/CameraMapGemini/ and I’ve adapted my Blended Box Map script to use his plugin to make a new and better blended box map that fixes all the limitations mentioned above. It’s still not as good as a dedicated plugin, but it’s far better than the older UVWMapping method.

Anyways, if you’re interested, read about it on my education page:

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_ed...g/blended_box_mapping.htm

And feel free to post any questions here or email me on the technique. And thanks again to Markus, his hard work on this plugin has made my year!

- Neil