Tangent Operator (TangentOp2) Property Editor

 
 
 

Contains controls that allow you to edit the tangent operator created by the following actions:

To display:

State

Sets the state of the tangent operator.

Active: the tangent map is active and can be updated.

Update Only on Topo Change: the tangent map is only updated when the object's topology changes.

Mute: temporarily freezes the tangent map, preventing any modifications.

Smoothing

Controls the extent to which the property map is smoothed.

Keep in mind that too much smoothing can introduce artifacts, so you should increase the smoothing value in small increments. It's also a good idea to have a realtime preview open in a viewport so you can see exactly when you've reduced the offending artifacts as much as possible. For more information, see Editing Tangents and Binormals [Texturing].

Encode Binormal Sign in Alpha

Sets the alpha channel to the dot product between the calculated/smoothed tangent (T) and the cross product of the calculated/smoothed binormal (B) with the vertex normal (N).

d = – T . ( B x N )

When mapped to [0, 1] and encoded as an unsigned short integer, this value should be decoded as:

((alpha / 65535 ) – 0.5 ) * 2

This value lets you know whether the part of the texture projection that the map values originate from is inverted, which would cause the bump mapping effect to be inverted if not taken into consideration.

When this option is off, the alpha value is always 1.

Operator Type

Specifies the type of data (tangents or binormals) the operator is generating.