Texture creation

[Chris Fleming]

Whenever I need a texture for something that I'm not satisfied with the available onboard textures that come with Vectorworks, I turn to the various texture sites. My question comes in regard to the proper method of creating the new texture.

 

I've attached a pic of the various files for a tile texture that I downloaded from 3Dtextures.me

 

My question is which image to put into which field in the Edit Texture pane? I've tried multiple variations, but I never achieve the quality that I'm looking for. Is there a secret (or something painfully obvious), or is it simply the short coming of using Renderworks to do my rendering?

 

Thanks for any input you can provide.

 

Chris

 

 

[Kevin Allen]

I'd be curious to see what you're after. Not sure these all correspond to how VWX defines a texture.

 

Not thinking of 'limitations' but of differing approaches.

 

[fabrica]

for me, I would do the following:

- in your editor of choice (affinity, Pixelmator etc) , I would overlay the ambient occlusion (at 90%) onto the base colour and export as 1 image.

 

Then add this image to the colour slot - change OBJ Attribute to -> image  

Not 100% sure but don't think Vectorworks can handle normal or height maps. (so no need for them)

If you need to scale image you have to use the absolutely useless 'set by image' button ..! 

If you are only using 'shaded' render that's all I'd do... 

[Chris Fleming]

28 minutes ago, Kevin Allen said:

I'd be curious to see what you're after. Not sure these all correspond to how VWX defines a texture.

 

Not thinking of 'limitations' but of differing approaches.

 

I'm not sure what I'm after either! LOL! Actually looking for realistic (as much as possible) grout lines, bumps, etc. I guess part of me assumed that since all these images were part of a downloaded texture, they might apply to the various fields in the Edit Texture pane. Again, maybe I'm trying to get a level of realism that Renderworks is incapable of on its own. I don't want to throw down thousands more on Cinema4D for instance, to have the learning curve etc. simply to make a kitchen look more realistic for our clients.

 

24 minutes ago, fabrica said:

for me, I would do the following:

- in your editor of choice (affinity, Pixelmator etc) , I would overlay the ambient occlusion (at 90%) onto the base colour and export as 1 image.

 

Then add this image to the colour slot - change OBJ Attribute to -> image  

Not 100% sure but don't think Vectorworks can handle normal or height maps. (so no need for them)

If you need to scale image you have to use the absolutely useless 'set by image' button ..! 

If you are only using 'shaded' render that's all I'd do... 

I'll give that a try. I appreciate both of you taking the time to reply.

 

I'm attaching two files here. One is of the finished texture, the other is of the various images used to create said texture. I'm trying to achieve that level of realism if possible. 

 

The last image is a modest project I'm working on to give the client an idea of what their new space might look like. I still have to add some props, but I wanted you to see what I'm doing currently. Don't get me started on the inability to change texture direction on the various cabinet plug-in objects in VW. To do that, I have to convert each cabinet object into a group, then break it down to texture the various parts correctly. The time investment is too steep IMO.

[Kevin Allen]

I'd be curious to see that hexes tile on a flat surface.

 

have you tried using the brick shader and bump in the VWX texture definition?

 

What are those cabinet faces?

[fabrica]

@Chris Fleming maybe look at twinmotion ? 

[Jeff Prince]

23 hours ago, Chris Fleming said:

Whenever I need a texture for something that I'm not satisfied with the available onboard textures that come with Vectorworks, I turn to the various texture sites. My question comes in regard to the proper method of creating the new texture.

 

I've attached a pic of the various files for a tile texture that I downloaded from 3Dtextures.me

 

My question is which image to put into which field in the Edit Texture pane? I've tried multiple variations, but I never achieve the quality that I'm looking for. Is there a secret (or something painfully obvious), or is it simply the short coming of using Renderworks to do my rendering?

 

Thanks for any input you can provide.

 

Chris

 

 

 

Hey Chris,

There are some tutorial about PBR textures, which is what you have.  The way you set them up varies by rendering engine.  Vectorworks doesn't use all the channels(Shaders) available in a PBR material, but some you will directly use and others you might edit to get more advanced effects within Vectorworks.

 

Here's a description based on the end of the file names:

...Basecolor = color image that looks like a photo, this is what we most associate with "texture".  Use that as the Color shader in Vectorworks

 

...Height = greyscale image where value determines height.  Use that as the Bump shader in Vectorworks.  You change variables within this panel to get displacement mapping/3D from the texture.

 

...Roughness = greyscale image where value determines how light behaves. You could use this in the Reflectivity shader in Vectorworks and play with the variables

...abientocclusion, can be used similarly to roughness

...normal, has a specific function in PBR engines that does not translate to Vectorworks

 

Here's an example and file to play with for you...

 

 

 

1068016781_tiletest.vwx

[rDesign]

23 hours ago, Chris Fleming said:

Don't get me started on the inability to change texture direction on the various cabinet plug-in objects in VW. To do that, I have to convert each cabinet object into a group, then break it down to texture the various parts correctly. The time investment is too steep IMO.

The most common work-around for this long-standing issue is to make a duplicate of the RW texture and rotate this duplicated texture by 90 degrees (I usually add ROT at the end of the texture name so I know which is which).
 

Then if you’re using Classes to assign textures to the parts of the Cabinet PIOs, you can make one Class for each of the duplicated textures and assign whichever Class is needed to make the grain run the correct direction for that part. No need to convert the Cabinet object into a group. 
 

My Vw files are filled with duplicated & rotated textures for this very reason.
 

This works for me about 99% of the time, but sometimes for some strange reason there might still be one cabinet door which won’t show the correct rotated texture.

[zoomer]

3 hours ago, rDesign said:

for this long-standing issue

 

AFAIK,

VW supports all C4D shaders and such, like when you import C4D Materials.

It is just that the Material Settings in VW do only offer a very limited feature

set when you want to create Materials in VW.

So I did not find any option to include a normal map in VW's bump channel.

But I would expect it would work nevertheless if the Material came from C4D.

And if a Material provider only applies only a Normal Map and no Bump Map,

it should be hard to get a similar "bump" surface result with VW material editor.

 

When Archicad finally added C4D Render Engine,

(which finally lead to VW include RW for all users without extra costs)

it looks like C4D already integrated the whole available C4D Material potential,

including layered Textures (?), not very curated in a cascading dialog hierarchy,

maybe overstrain most architectural CAD users ... but if you really want,

it's there.

 

13 hours ago, fabrica said:

maybe look at twinmotion ? 

 

Not a bad idea ....

[Christiaan]

This kind of thing makes me wish we had some kind of wiki community help files; so that we could produce a well laid out page that identifies all the different texture resources you might find on the internet and how they relate to making a texture in VW.

[Chris Fleming]

On 3/31/2023 at 10:44 AM, jeff prince said:

 

Hey Chris,

There are some tutorial about PBR textures, which is what you have.  The way you set them up varies by rendering engine.  Vectorworks doesn't use all the channels(Shaders) available in a PBR material, but some you will directly use and others you might edit to get more advanced effects within Vectorworks.

 

Here's a description based on the end of the file names:

...Basecolor = color image that looks like a photo, this is what we most associate with "texture".  Use that as the Color shader in Vectorworks

 

...Height = greyscale image where value determines height.  Use that as the Bump shader in Vectorworks.  You change variables within this panel to get displacement mapping/3D from the texture.

 

...Roughness = greyscale image where value determines how light behaves. You could use this in the Reflectivity shader in Vectorworks and play with the variables

...abientocclusion, can be used similarly to roughness

...normal, has a specific function in PBR engines that does not translate to Vectorworks

 

Here's an example and file to play with for you...

 

 

 

1068016781_tiletest.vwx 2.47 MB · 0 downloads

Thank you! That is exactly what I was looking for with my initial question; which image to use in each panel. Very nice! Thank you!

[Chris Fleming]

On 3/31/2023 at 10:55 AM, rDesign said:

The most common work-around for this long-standing issue is to make a duplicate of the RW texture and rotate this duplicated texture by 90 degrees (I usually add ROT at the end of the texture name so I know which is which).
 

Then if you’re using Classes to assign textures to the parts of the Cabinet PIOs, you can make one Class for each of the duplicated textures and assign whichever Class is needed to make the grain run the correct direction for that part. No need to convert the Cabinet object into a group. 
 

My Vw files are filled with duplicated & rotated textures for this very reason.
 

This works for me about 99% of the time, but sometimes for some strange reason there might still be one cabinet door which won’t show the correct rotated texture.

Thank you! Forum member and Vectorworks user Kevin K actually picked up the phone and called me last week. All the way from French Polynesia! He recommended and then showed me how to do exactly what you're recommending. It made an immediate impact on my renders.

 

This forum is an invaluable resource! Thanks to all of you!