I’m using custom geometry in my frost, and it doesn’t appear to be preserving the UVW map. Does it inherit the UVs from the Particle Object or the Particle Geometry?
Every indication is that its getting the UVs from the Source Object. Is there a way to get UVs from the Geometry object? Is this a new feature request>
UVs on the custom geometry object have lower priority than UVs on the source point cloud.
Thankfully, Max has up to 100 mapping channels, so you should be able to use both, as long as you don’t reuse the same mapping channel on both the source and the custom geometry. If you do reuse the channel, the source geometry will prevail.
For example, create a Teapot, a small Box and a Frost.
Pick the Teapot as the Particle Source, set to Geometry, Custom Geometry and pick the Box as the custom geometry.
Assign a Standard Material to all three objects and put a Gradient with Red/Green/Blue colors in the Diffuse Slot. Show in the Viewport.
At this point, since all objects are using Mapping Channel 1, the Teapot will pass the UVs to Frost and the Boxes will be colored in a single color based on the color evaluated at the Teapot vertex.
Now add a UVW Map modifier to the Box and set it to Box mode and Channel 2. Change the Texture Map to Channel 2 and you will see the full gradient on all Boxes.
If you add a UVW Map to the Teapot, set it to Sphere and Channel 2, the Frost will once again set the Boxes to a single color because the Channel 2 from the particle source has higher priority than the own Channel 2 coordinates of the Custom Geometry sources…
The above rule does not apply to the built-in geometry primitives. If you select “Box” instead of “Custom Geometry”, the Channel 1 of the built-in primitive will be used and not the Channel 1 of the particle source… If you want to propagate the source mapping to the primitives, you will have to use Channels 2 to 99 since they do not exist in the primitive.
Fantastic stuff.