How to texture a cylinder in XNA4 with multiple textures?

Question

Basically, I'm trying to cover a slot machine reel (white cylinder model) with multiple evenly spaced textures around the exterior. The program will be Windows only and the textures will be dynamically loaded at run-time instead of using the content pipeline. (Windows based multi-screen setup with XNA from the Microsoft example)

Most of the examples I can find online are for XNA3 and are still seemingly gibberish to me at this point.

So I'm looking for any help someone can provide on the subject of in-game texturing of objects like cylinders with multiple textures.

Maybe there is a good book out there that can properly describe how texturing works in XNA (4.0 specifically)?

Thanks

Answer 1

You have a few options. It depends two things: whether the model is loaded or generated at runtime, and whether your multiple textures get combined into one or kept individual.

If you have art skills or know an artist, probably the easiest approach is to get them to texture map the cylinder with as many textures as you want (multiple materials). You'd want your Model to have one mesh (ModelMesh) and one material (ModelMeshPart) per texture required. This is assuming the cylinders always have a fixed number of textures!. Then, to swap the textures at runtime you'd iterate through the ModelMesh.Effects collection, cast each to a BasicEffect and set it's Texture property.

If you can't modify the model, you'll have to generate it. There's an example of this on the AppHub site: http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/sample/primitives_3d. It probably does not generate texture coordinates so you'd need to add them. If you wanted 5 images per cylinder, you should make sure the number of segments is a multiple of 5 and the V coordinate should go from 0 to 1, 5 times as it wraps around the cylinder. To keep your textures individual with this technique, you'd need to draw the cylinder in 5 chunks, each time setting the GraphicsDevice.Textures[0] to your current texture.

With both techniques it would be possible to draw the cylinder in a single draw call, but you'd need to merge your textures into a single one using Texture2D.GetData and Texture2D.SetData. This is going to be more efficient, but really isn't worth the trouble. Well not unless you making some kind of crazy slot machine particle system anyway.