Non-repeating texture tiles with aiTriplanar in Maya/Arnold

This is not as sophisticated as a stochastic tiling method but usually, it’s good enough (especially when you use it as a layer in your shader tree).

How to use it

  • Simply connect the aiTriplanar node after the file node.
  • Set the attributes:
    • Coord Space (in may case world)
    • Blend
    • Scale (lower the number for bigger textures)
    • Enable Cell
    • Rotate (range is 0-1)
    • Blend (the 0.1 usually okay)
An example of the connections
simple tiling vs aiTriplanar with Cell
simple tiling
aiTriplanar with the Cell feature

As you can see the results are better (the used texture of course is still recognizable).
Again, not as nice as a more advanced method but with a second layer this could be enough in most cases.


I wrote a MEL script to “convert” the selected file nodes to aiTriplanar (works with most connections):
convertToTriplanar
How to use it:
Select the file nodes in a shader tree and run the script.

Cheers, D

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