On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:05:15 -0800, Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:

>Kyle wrote:
>> This simplistic example does not demonstrate how helpful this functionality would
be.  A better
>> example is a recent scene that I was working on in which I was building a brick
road.  I defined a
>> section of road as a union of 36x100 randomly textured bricks.  I then placed the
sections
>> end-to-end to form the complete road.  I wanted to have lines on the road too, but
wanted some
>> waviness to the lines for more realism.  Overlaying a texture on the entire road
would be the
>> simplest method, providing there was a method to do so.
>
>In this example, you could actually place all the bricks in a union and 
>give them a single texture block.

Yes, it would work.  The problem was that the memory used by a 2000x37 brick road
exceeded the memory I had available and drive thrashing ensued.  Breaking the road
down into sections resolved the
memory issue, but then I couldn't texture the road as one object.  Here's a link to a
thread where I posted an example and the discussion led to a solution, although it
used more memory than an
overlaid texture would...

http://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3Chp0ro31f9m1dr7spccdp4g3j0hj5fvhdh0%404ax.com%3E/


There are other examples I can think of where overlaying a texture would be applicable
as well.  What if you want to add a texture layer to a predefined, pre-textured mesh
object, perhaps one that's
UV mapped using image maps?  That'd be kind of complex, if not impossible, without
being able to overlay the existing texture.

Perhaps you have a complex object that you've built and textured, but it looks to
clean and you want to add a little "dirt".  You can go back and use layered textures
on each piece of the object, or
you can overlay one dirt texture over the entire object.  Imagine trying to transform
the dirt texture on each piece of a complex object to have any patterns in the dirt
line up properly between
pieces of the object.  An overlaid texture would be much simpler.

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