World space materials

World space, or world aligned materials use an absolute position in the map to determine how to display the texture, instead of relying on the UV wrap of each mesh. I have experimented a bit with world space aligned materials before, but finally got them to work. The wood floor I have been using from the PolyPixel Freebie set is already world aligned, so I just transferred those material nodes to my custom 6x6 hall tile. However, I learned how to do it myself, and I changed the interior brick materials to world aligned materials so it is easier to place the tile coves throughout the ground floor of my school level. I learned how to create these using this excellent video: 

I ended up using a slightly different method when it came down to connecting nodes in the materials editor, but he explains it very well. 

My versions are below. With the world aligned materials, the normals don't work correctly if the texture is facing the wrong way, so I had to make separate x-facing and y-facing versions. There is probably a way to do this within a single material, or through a material instance, but that is beyond my abilities for now. In these screenshots, the tile coves are two separate meshes: one for the long sections, and another for the corners. They line up perfectly because they have the same axis. The textures always line up because they use the same world aligned material as the adjacent wall. Also, I am able to use the same mesh for all of the long sections because the world aligned material automatically scales the texture properly. The wood wainscot sections all have to be separately scaled in Blender and imported because the wood material is not world aligned. These world aligned brick materials have saved be numerous hours in scaling and importing -- I just line up the axis of each tile cove, and they're done!