Node
Procedural cube mesh
Make sure you’ve read the general notes about all the nodes.
This node outputs a cube in the form of mesh data. But it is procedural, meaning a node connected to its output can ask for a different cube with different parameters and a different cube will be returned. Typically the simple layout node takes advantage of the procedural nature of this node.
You control to what material index each face will be assigned to, so you can assign a different material to each face. Useful to apply a facade material and a roof material for example.
UVs
You control how the cube will be UVed, and the options for the UVs need a bit more explanations. There are 3 facades UV modes, and these do NOT apply to the top and bottom faces. To better demonstrate the result of each mode, we’ll use this facade texture as an example.
1) UVs 0 to 1, no scaling, no translation allowed
The simplest mode. Each face of the facades will be unwrapped from 0 to 1 on U and V. That’s it. Useful to display an entire texture independently of the cube’s size. Not useful for facade textures.
2) UVs scale in increment of 1, no translation allowed
The UVs will scale with their corresponding face, larger cubes will have larger faces, and as a result those will have their UVs cover a larger area. However the UVs will always be round integer values (1, 2, 10, 50…), and not decimal values (0.2, 8.3, 10.1 …).
As a result, the textures displayed will never be cut somewhere in the middle, but will repeat entirely, and will always start and stop at the cube’s borders. The UVs will be at minimim 0 to 1, so that a texture will always be displayed at least once in each direction (U and V) even if the face is too small in either direction.
You can control the scaling with the UV scale parameter.
This mode is useful when you have a seamless facade texture, with windows. It would look unrealistic to have windows cut in the middle by the border of the cube / building. On the other hand a bit of texture stretching is unavoidable.
3) UVs have exact face size, random translation allowed
This is like the “free” mode. The UVs will scale exactly with their corresponding face, multiplied by the UV scale parameter. And Random UV translation will be applied also to the facade faces if it is enabled.
This mode avoids texture stretching on the faces, and gives more visual variety and randomness if the UVs are randomly translated. Useful if you have a simple facade texture that can be cut anywhere without looking weird, like the ones generated by the simple windows drawer.
The top and bottom faces are always in mode 3.