Scripts in 3D Canvas

Chapter 5: Adding Material

So what is the difference in texture and material in this context?

Anyway, now we're going to use the paint strip to apply material to every face in an object. Here is the full code of the script used to paint the beach ball on the front page.

Here's what it does:
• Set up an array for the six materials, then call SetupMaterials (though in this case we'll only use the first material);
• Create a new object - we're going to copy the old object and paint the new one, so the old one isn't changed;
• For every face on the old object add a face to the new object - every new face will have it's own points so the texture can be applied to individual faces;
• Set the uv coordinates for the faces;
• Apply the material to the face.

There are a couple of options. You can apply a small random shift the the uv coordinates. You can rotate every second face texture by 90 degrees. This is included because the 3D Canvas smooth operation will also do this - what I mean is if you take a sphere and smooth it, every second face in the sphere will be rotated 90 degrees.

And what's the point? Well that's up to you. You could use it to add texture to a terrain - for example by assigning a different altitude to a each face on the paint strip. Here's the script applied to a snail shell (spirulata beachballata). How else would you get the growth rings right?