Does anyone have any tips on the best UV mapping approach for getting even procedural noise displacement on objects that have inconsistent subdivisions across the mesh?
Here's an example of what I mean, in the form of a cube. My cube has a bevel, and when I apply the Octane tag and increase my subdivisions it causes denser regions of polygons within the bevelled area:
When I apply a noise displacement to my object, if I'm in object projection mode on the noise, the noise is rather concentrated along those edges which is not ideal.
This forces me to use UV maps to get a cleaner result. When using UV maps, it seems as if it uses UV space to determine what size the noise should be rather than, what I assume object space is doing, and using the polygon sizes? So UV maps seem to be the way to fix this problem based on my experiments. But different UV maps give different results, some better than others, for example:
This is with object space (no uv mapping), rather jaggy and concentrated noise:
This is with a generic cube-2 type UV map on the base cube (ignoring the bevel deformer), looks more evenly distributed and smooth but still not perfect:
This is with a UV map created on the object after baking down the bevel, Each face is its own UV island (seems less even and consistent to me and looks like there's some stretching distortion, perhaps due to the UV map having additional seams?):
Would really appreciate if anyone can give me a better understanding of the intricacies of what's happening behind the scenes here, why different UV maps are yielding different results, and what the best approach is for this sort of a problem from a UV mapping perspective.
Also if anyone is aware of a way I can control the subdivision so that it samples more evenly across the whole mesh so that it avoids subdividing areas that already have smaller polygons, that would be cool, as far as I know it's not possible though. Thanks!