OTOY Forums

I'm having trouble understanding how to do something extremely simple. I want to put a label on an object and have the base color of the object seen outside of the extents of the label - NOT black everywhere, NOT mirrored everywhere, NOT white everywhere, NOT clamped (whatever that means). I want the border mode to be alpha is what I'm saying - like a sticker on a bottle. So far I have only been able to do such a thing by selecting a certain group of polygons on the object and using that selection to contain the texture, but this is not ideal. I would like to be able to just offset U or V to move the label around the surface while a base color is 'behind' the label. I know I can achieve this with mix materials and mask the opacity, but that requires the outer dimensions of the mask to correspond with the overall area of the object, and all that's so complicated for just putting a little rectangular sticker on a cylinder basically. With C4D shaders, I would simply drag the label texture onto the cylinder after I've applied a base color. I would change the label mapping to cylindrical and fiddle with the UV scaling and offset until it was where I wanted it. All the while, seeing the cylinder's base color anywhere that the label is not. Surely this can be achieved rather easily with the Octane shaders.

In a different post, another user was asking how to keep an image from tiling so that he might use it as a label. (viewtopic.php?f=30&t=48490) He was told to use black border mode, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what the point of wrapping black, or white, or any of those options around the non essential part of the label is. I must be missing something really obvious here!

I've attached a simple example of the issue I am having, if you have time please tell me what's going on. (How can I see red around the label, and not black, white, mirrored, etc.?)

-Ben

Why don't you put a texture to opacity as should be?

prisonbread wrote:...
-Ben

hi ben,
not quite sure what you mean saying "...that requires the outer dimensions of the mask to correspond with the overall area of the object..." but, mix material with your png in smount should do the trick.
of course, add transform node to it to have your scaling right... also projection, if you want to change that one.
then - go ahead and select "white color" as border mode so everython alse gets stamped out.... here's the screenshot of the situation. everything needed should be visible:

Mesut, this is very close to what I'm after.

I understand how to use a black and white image as a mask in a mix material, but I'm not trying to use the black and white values of the 'X' in my example in that way. Perhaps I should have chosen a colored "label" to make it clear that I want the white and black X to be opaque, like a label on a wine bottle. I am not just trying to turn the lines of it into another material the way you have it (like a die-cut decal on a car). I understand that I can get this black and white X to be opaque if I put it into the diffuse of a new material, pipe it into a mix material, and mask it with a separate black and white image that shows where I want the edge of the label to be, but this is troublesome, because it requires two images just to tell it that I want it transparent everywhere that the label is not covering. I guess what I want to know, is if there is a way to achieve this without having to create a Black and White "silhouette" image as a mask for the mix material every time.

I have attached a screenshot of what I understand to be the only solution, one that required me to go and make an image of a white box inside a black square. I have also attached a picture of what would have been a simpler solution, using a non-interpolated square gradient as the matte, but there are no options to keep it from repeating endlessly, such as the border modes in the image texture node. Again, I ask, to be clear, is there any way to do this without going and creating an additional matte image for rectangular labels?

Thanks for your time,

Ben