Hydraulic Hose Texture Mapping

[Jimmy!]

Hello,

I am trying to create a material for hydraulic hose routings.  I have a lot of reference photos that I use to create my texture maps and materials, but I'm having a hard time with this one.  The attached picture shows actual product, and the rendering used the material: [Material = Soft Shiny Plastic + Bump Map w/ Tile Grid].

I have 2 problems:
1. The weave texture typically comes out too sharp, and
2. You can see seams in the image where the texture repeats (currently using a box map).  Any recommendations on mapping this texture to hose routings of complex shape?  Do I need to blur the bump map more to get a smoother-looking weave texture? 

Thank you!
Jimmy 

[Will Gibbons]

Yes, blur your bump map for a softer bump and you need to use UV mapping, but this assumes the model is UV mapped, and if it's not, then you need to use a program that supports UV unwrapping so you can assign UV coordinates to the geometry. Rhino can, but pretty much all other CAD softwares can't.