I have a large mesh with > 1.5 million faces. I would like to uniformly add a texture to the object without UV mapping (as blender freezes every time). The texture is quite simple and can be applied evenly throughout the object.
1 Answer
What render engine will you be using? Cycles? Blender Internal? OpenGL Viewport/Game Engine?
Yes, for the most part you can, except for real time rendering; for which you probably have little options but to unwrap.
For the other two you could use either one of two methods:
- Generated Texture Coordinates - Will fit a 1x1x1 cube of the image to the object using a 3 axis box like projection. You can later adjust repetition by controlling the scale of the image or with a vector mapping node.
- Object Texture coordinates Will evenly tile the texture over your object regardless of size. The texture will stretch if the object itself is not evenly scaled. You can also adjust repetition by controlling the size of the image or with a vector mapping node.
For both no unwrapping is necessary, face angles will be used to mask from where the texture will be projected. Be sure to select Box projection mode in your image texture node.
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$\begingroup$ I got it working, how do I save this mesh as an obj + mtl file? When I export it directly it saves a mtl file, however the texture is note saved. $\endgroup$– ke.liMay 19, 2016 at 17:01
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1$\begingroup$ Have in mind that these are generated texture coordinates, that means blender simulates them dynamically, they are not part of the mesh and cannot be exported into other formats, as far as I know. The OBJ + MTL is a way to export mainly geometry, some basic material properties are kept, but it is not a full fledged or faithful material export. Also textures are never embedded, the must be manually bundled in with the model as an external file. $\endgroup$ May 19, 2016 at 17:08