Techniques Using SOPs

Cube Instances with Unique Faces

Note: this example may appear blank if you are using MacOS or have an older GPU.

This example comes from an old HelpGroup question about putting unique images on the faces of instances. There are a number of ways to approach this challenge. You could certainly use the ‘instances of instances’ approach we’ve outlined in other examples — where we create the cube faces individually. That’s a fine approach, but here we want to instead focus on working with cubes. To do this, we need to use a cube map texture along with texture instancing — this isn’t supported on all GPUs, so you may find that this example doesn’t load on your computer.

You’ll see in the example that we instance 4 cubes, and that on our geometry COMP we use the Instance Texture parameters. For this to work correctly we provide a path to our TOPs with a wild-card card character in place of where we’ll substitute a digit. For example:

textures/item*/final

This is going to be expressed as the following during instancing:

textures/item1/final
textures/item2/final
textures/item3/final
textures/item4/final
...etc...

This is a nice way to work with whole cubes rather than trying to think of each face of each cube when working with textures.

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Tested in TouchDesigner099 2020.23680

Updated 06.03.20
Matthew Ragan
Zoe Sandoval