question

Hi
This is really cool, what if you put a setRange at the end of the chain, between aiUvTransform and your shader, with Min value to -2.
Normally the seam disapear

If you have problems with stability on a certain node. Construct a case that can break every time and show. Since it's just a basic node and a normal input ( uv coords ) it should be working, with zero crashes, all the time.
I just saw it's a known issue, I guess you can install 2018 as a temp solution till it gets fixed.

Else you can reroute the entire UV to a UV transform node as a passthrough, see if that stabalizes anything. Pulling the stuff out of the image node it self and handle it seperatly.

Regarding the actual case.
I took your images and rendered the output you seek.

As I mentioned in first post, you want to make an ADD, between the default planes UV ( untampered ) with your maya default texture coord node ( max/maya node is called different but the functionality is the same ) - and then the UV map you painted.

Sourcing the combined result to the material.
And then I get what you want.

If your final goal is to use R&G data to drive UV, you first want to convert it to vector space, a constant bias scale from 0-1 -> -1 to 1 ( or range node with the 2 sets set to 0 & 1 and -1 & 1 ). You then add in the default uv channel, adding them up and pipe it to some bitmaps UV.

You can see the waves goes in all 4 directions here driven by the RG bitmap that has the normalized color 128.128.0 and then the 4 directions.

https://imgur.com/S7Qm3eG

The map it self was drawn in a vector paint app where the different colors represent different directions.

I suppose you can decifer my node setup, the nodes them self should be identical to Maya as well as overall hirachy of nodes. ( after all we all use Arnold, and what works in host A always work in host B, provided we work with Arnold shader nodes. Infact, I have all the Arnold Maya nodes in 3ds max as well, Those shaders are host independant...nice. ) You can also implement time as a factor and displace the time for interesting results. Melting lava, rivers running, whatever of that nature.

Most important aspect is not how to wire it up but to understand we want to ADD 2 uvs, 1 is base and other one is our "tweak" input and that it is important to move the center of the RG map down to 0.

It's repro with 2017 Update 4, but not with Maya 2018.1 and MtoA 2.1.0.1
Crashes in the Maya MPlug api

How about using aiUVTransform?

@rachid Hadj Abderrahmane I see that you are putting the setRange on the out color at the end of the chain. This approach works, it seems to get rid of the seam, but I don't think this will be possible in all cases since I don't want to mess with the color information. It would be better to use this approach to create a "mask" and then connect it to the opacity of the shader.

I tried adding a remap ramp before the setRange. Playing with the black and white values appears to "erode" the seam and create a cutoff threshold.

Here is my node graph.

Here you can see the effect when you modify the range.

https://streamable.com/xcm7t

Hi David
I tried your scene, but nothing seem to work. The Repeat/Scale parameter has no effect! something do not fit correctly in your setup
Here what I get with setRange, the seam is clean at 0-180-360 degre, but appear the rest of rotation.

and here the setup

Thanks for the recommendation @rachid Hadj Abderrahmane. I tried adding a setRange node but I wasn't able to get rid of the seam, only move it around (in the same way as playing with the scale/repeat attributes).

I uploaded the scene files if anyone is interested in having a look. This was made in Maya 2017 with Arnold 2.0.2.2.

https://mega.nz/#!tct2wLpT!woaWBd-Fa8hCwW--z9-VvOOXBcer5cam1zvHCOUsyyE

@Mads Drøschler, I spent some time experimenting with different settings on the aiUVTransform node, modifying the pivot, repeat, translate, etc. and I managed to find a procedure that makes sense and allows me to position the texture as I like.

I have one minor issue and I was wondering if you can suggest a way to solve it. I'm using this tiling texture.

And this UVMap.

However, I'm getting a very thin seam around the edge of the geometry in the Arnold render.

Seam

This is the geometry

This is the node graph.

https://imgur.com/a/jk7jN

And these are the aiUVTransform settings.

https://imgur.com/a/RvSEo

I was wondering whether you can suggest a method to eliminate the seam. I found that changing the filter settings helped a bit (from quadratic to none), but the ideal would be to "erode" the edge a few pixels. I can also fix the problem by changing the UV layout, but this is not an acceptable long-term solution because for other shapes (like the hexagon) changing the UV layout does not fix the seam.

@Stephen Blair and @Mads Drøschler I wanted to share some of my results with you guys and get some feedback. My goal is to build a library of animated shapes and textures and then combine them in different ways to create characters or morphing "psychedelic" objects. I am doing a lot of this work "by hand" and I was wondering whether you guys might be able to suggest some alternate procedural techniques that would speed up my process.

I was inspired by this image by illustrator Louis Wain from the early 1900's.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/17/f1/c817f1be797c5de0e51f30f86f9d0b63.jpg

And here is a rough layout I did of that illustration using image cards with animation on the UV Transform translate frame.

https://streamable.com/fs5si

I wanted to continue adding detail in the textures (using displacement maps and colour mattes) and try to make a "real-life" 3D version of the original illustration.

Here are some of the textures I have made in my experimentation. This is an animated displacement map with UVMap distortion on the opacity channel to create "rippling" effect.

https://streamable.com/bv2cz

And here is one with an additional layer of animated lines moving on the surface.

https://streamable.com/w2nlz

And my goal was to use these textures to create different kinds of creatures, or "beings" built from many intricate moving patterns. I really enjoy working with these UV Maps because they allow me to have many layers of moving details nested one inside the other.

Do you have any ideas on tools to try, possible approaches using Arnold, other techniques or interesting reference material? All feedback is welcome!

The Pivot is the spwan point for scale and rotation.

Try raise the second input on the pivot_frame, then rotate, the higher, the more offset the center of the circle the frame rotates around becomes.

It looks like there is an exponential factor driving it, so you can try implement a reverse function before a value to counter it.