Cycles texture mapping, generated coordinates with world orientation?

Question

Basically I want to map a texture in cycles with the generated coordinates, but have it ignore the orientation of the object.

The effect I want to achieve is a material that has a gradient, spread top to bottom of the individual objects dimensions, but always orientated top to bottom of the world no-matter how the object is rotated.

Any way to achieve this? thanks

Answer 1

Yes, this is possible.

There are several ways to achieve this, here are a couple:

Position:

You can use the Position output of the Geometry node and separate out the blue (vertical) channel:

Note that since it's based on the world center some objects end up with values outside the 0-1 range:

Texture Coordinate:

You can also use the Object or the Generated output of the Texture coordinate node and convert it to world space with the Vector Transform node:

Now each object will have a gradient from 1 at the top to 0 at the bottom regardless of rotation: