INDEX

🪄 What is Magic Coordinate?

Magic Coordinate maintains the scaling of your procedural textures consistently across different object ratios while sharing the same material. It supports deformations through armature modifier and also other non-destructive mesh deforming workflows. You don’t even need bothering applying the scale transformations as it auto normalizes the stretching on the fly! It helps taking your procedural textures further down the pipeline, skipping UVs and Baking as much as possible. A simple and yet powerful tool, specially when dealing with animated characters with multiple objects, reducing redundancy of materials and minimizing overall tweaking. Ultimately, increases your productivity while focusing on the things that really matter and allowing you to have more fun on the look development process!

Why it was developed and why it is needed?

The reason behind its development is that the Object, Generated and Rest Position coordinates have a lot of limitations and they are useful only in specific conditions. It makes the texture mapping process counter intuitive, cumbersome and fragile so the goal is taking the best of each coordinate, unifying it and expand the functionalities from there. This results in a faster and more flexible workflow for using a same material in multiple objects, covering even complex cases like animated characters and parametrical modeling, for example. This tool can help you taking advantage of the abundance of the good procedural materials in the market and making the use much more versatile in your projects, spending less effort and time on mapping these into your objects and keeping the project tidy without creating material redundancy.

How to Install

It is the conventional way for installing. There is no need to restart Blender after activating it:

Go to Edit > Preferences. In the pop-up window find the section Add-ons. Click on Install… and load the ZIP file. Enable the add-on by clicking the checkbox and Save Preferences to make sure it will be used at every Blender session.

Windows, Parameters & How to Use

The workflow happens in two basic steps, regardless the order taken:

• Setting the modifier:
  • 🧙‍♂️Set Magic Coordinate Wizard you can set up the modifier for multiple objects in a single click!
• Using the nodegroup as coordinate input.
  • 🧙Get Magic Coodinate Wizard you can make any existing smart procedural material compatible in one or two clicks! It will replace or connect the nodegroup as coordinate input for the necessary sockets on the active material’s nodetree.

🧙‍♂️Set Magic Coordinate Modifier (Wizard)

Under the Add Modifier button, in the Modifier’s tab, you will find the UI for setting and managing the Set Magic Coordinate modifier. No worries, these three first buttons it will work with multiple objects selected at the same time, as a batch wizard.

1. Set Magic Coordinate - Adds the Set Magic Coordinate modifier for all the selected objects. It creates an attribute called magic_coord which can be used in the Shader Editor by adding the Get Magic Coordinate nodegroup **to serve as input coordinate for your shaders. (see next section)
2. Auto Sort - When highlighted (turned on), after ① Set Magic Coordinate is pressed it will automatically rearrange the modifier stack for the selected objects looking for the proper order to the Set Magic Coordinate modifier be placed depending on each object’s modifiers combination.
3. Trash Bin Icon - Removes Set Magic Coordinate modifier from selected objects.

Offset Parameters (per Object via Set Magic Modifier)

These next options will help tweaking the coordinate individually at object level. This adds an extra layer of control for when certain features of your material’s texture could produce more interesting results. For example: positioning a scratch on a specific part of the model without affecting the other objects that share the same material.

1. Location (x, y, z) - Offsets the coordinate used by the Get Magic Coordinate nodegroup for the current object.
2. Rotate (radians x, y, z) - Rotates the coordinate used by the Get Magic Coordinate nodegroup for the current object.