Ember Texmap

[hdarren]

I am under the impression that it works correctly with meshes in either XYZ (where [X,Y,Z] in the “target” object’s local space maps to [X,Y,Z] in the Ember object’s local space) or World XYZ (where the target object’s world space transform is applied, but the transform from world space to the Ember object’s object sapce is not applied so your Ember object should have an identity transform).

How do you specify the channel to be used? Like are we expecting Color->Color? What would be Mono and NormalPerturb? Density and Normal?

The “Color” float32[3] channel is hard-coded to be used at the moment. Mono maps evaluate the average of the color, and NormalPerturb doesn’t work. We plan to support mono channels and normal perturb in the future, as well as allowing an arbitrary channel to be selected.

For coordinates, are we assuming the Ember domain box is the 0-1 coordinates for the map?

That’s an interesting idea, but not how it works currently. The UVW (or XYZ) passed to the map is currently interpreted as ObjectSpace coordinates in the Ember object. In the future we would like to apply the reverse node transform of the ember object but that isn’t currently done.

Is the map discretized and cached? Or is the Ember evaluated for each sample?

This depends on the settings of the object pointed at. If you have “discretize” checked on the target SimEmber then a grid is automatically created. Otherwise you could always add your own Grid node in the expression if you wanted that behavior. Without those conditions met, the entire expression is evaluated for each map sample.

Nitpicking because I can’t get the useful bits to work so I can’t come up with better feedback… the “tex” in texmap seems a bit redundant in the context of how it is used. Heck, even the whole word could be removed, right? In a list of maps, Ember should stand out well enough, right? Discuss.

Makes sense. Ember Voxmap sounds a lot weirder than Ember Texmap but it was another alternative.