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