'Follow Me & Keep' Texture Alignment Preservation

[ozftw]

Hi there,

I'm attempting to model a railway tunnel, using the plugin 'Follow and Keep' (by user Wikii?). I have a texture which I would like to apply to the ground surface of the tunnel - a texture featuring the railway lines, sleepers, ballast etc. This texture would need to remain parallel to the walls of the tunnel at all times, so that the railway line appears contiguous. However, the plugin does not seem to preserve textures (creates geometry without material), and I would prefer not to have to do the alignment manually for each face due to the number of faces involved.

Is there a way to preserve texture alignment when extruding a tunnel with horizontal and vertical curves?

Any assistance provided is greatly appreciated.

[TIG]

There are several UV mapping / quad tools - do a search...

[ozftw]

I have 'UV Toolkit' and 'UVTools' however neither seem to be working in this case, or maybe I'm just doing it wrong. In the case of the former, my understanding is that it will only work on quads, but the geometry that 'Follow Me & Keep' spits out is triangulated. Please let me know if that is incorrect, or if I'm missing something obvious here.

A simplified example:
(in this case, the surface curves upwards a little before curving down, while consistently curved around horizontally)

My attempts to apply UV mapping in this case has led to distorted or poorly aligned texturing. If possible, would you be able to suggest any other suitable tools for this task? Or perhaps a few pointers if the tools I already have are sufficient and I am simply using them incorrectly?

[Gaieus]

UV Toolkit could be used to a certain extent but it involves other plugins you should use to "ben" the structure and I am not certain it could be done precisely.

Another solution would be TT's new quad face tools:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=39442

With that, you can easily "unfold (a copy of) your bottom face, UV map it by simply positioning the material on the unfolded rectangular shape and applying this back to your tracks. Certainly it will distort the texture on your facets so the higher the polygon count is, the more seamless this distortion is but even with lower polygon count, it is better than manually suffering...

[ozftw]

The Quad Face Tools plugin you suggested seems to work great so far, my thanks to you for drawing my attention to it (and thomthom for creating it). The texture distortion is acceptable, I'm just happy that I won't have to spend hours repeating the same tedious task for hundreds of faces. Thanks again.