FRP Floor Grate Transparent Texture

[Pat Stanford]

I am looking for either a texture of FRP floor grate, or instructions on how to make a texture that has transparent sections. So far I have had no luck in making my own.

 

Something like this.  This will be seen in small sections in a big space, so a solid color is fine. I don't need the noise int he color of bump map. Not going to be used photo realistic.

I don't really care about the edges, but the holes are 1" square and the "grout" between is 1/4"

 

I intend to apply this to a 1" thick extrude. I would like to be able to see through the openings in the grate.

 

I tried using the Square Tile procedural texture and it works OK, but I have not been able to figure out how to make the centers transparent. I have tried Color, Tile, and other and nothing has seemed to work.

 

Ideas pleas?

[Kevin Allen]

the difficulty will be in the thickness. A texture with transparency is easy enough. You need a photo editor and ideally (to me) an alpha channel. So the mask is just a black and white image as you described. The texture will be planar when applied.

[michaelk]

I would have thought this would work:

 

In VW draw this:

 

 

Export at an image, draw the marquee, set the size to 2.5", etc.

 

Use that as Transparency shader, Image Mask.

 

You can't use the attribute mapping tool if the shader is just a color, so you have to make an image that is just the color you want and use that in the Color shader.

 

I thought that if you mapped that as a Plane Map Type in the OIP, that you would get exactly what you want.  But I tried it and it's only mapping to the surface.

 

 

We need a new edition of the Renderworks Recipe Book.

[michaelk]

If it were me, I'd be super tempted to extrude a bunch of lines 🤪

 

[Pat Stanford]

Extrudes not happening. I have about 1000 square feet of the stuff. I am busy deleting nuts and bolts from the imported file just to be able to make it useable. Don't need any more geometry when a texture is good enough.

[zoomer]

I once had such a sheet metal grid ceiling in an office building in a large area.

I even tried a displacement texture

(geometry nearly reasonable at only max quality settings and render times)

or a Symbol with a square meter of real geometry ....

 

So I gave up and decided to even try without transparency as it will

never look like having some Z height.

 

My Idea was to create a flat 2D Texture for one opening from a top view,

meaning, in suitable pixel dimensions, starting from the image boarder :

- the Material thickness and color (bright gray in my case

- a darker background color part in the center

- and a gradient between border and center color in between.

 

So this basically would only look reasonable, watching from below, for only

exactly that single opening directly perpendicular to your camera of course.

As that 2D texture can't ever mimic that perspective and 3D depth effect.

 

So I could render that perspective with grid ceiling by a single extrude and

without any increase in render time.

Unexpectedly the client said, ah yes, good, that is exactly how these things

appear in reality (!?)

 

So as there are soon again any floor grates comming for me,

I will try that again ....

 

EDIT :

Found the Texture again :

 

 

As I see I even got rid of the gradient between border and center ....

[zoomer]

But as far as I know,

Bricscad BIM users build a real geometry Block of each grate version and just

spread them in their drawing. (Likely Revit users will build them from Walls)

 

And I think real time solutions like Twinmotion would not have any problems

such geometry. (If you can spread millions of vegatation ....)

And now with Lumen and maybe Nanite in the future ....

 

But I think do not try this with RW Rendering.

Edited October 5, 2023 by zoomer

[zoomer]

54 minutes ago, michaelk said:

If it were me, I'd be super tempted to extrude a bunch of lines 🤪

 

 

 

I also had industrial grates in the past. technical stuff floor on top of the flat roof.

 

Of course it would have been so great to se a "view angle dependent" transparancy

for birds eye views. So if it is ever possible with real geometry I would do this.

Maybe at least in the future.

 

I should try and test again to see what is possible already today,

with structural members, grates, metal stairs, scaffolding and all that stuff.

Maybe we can already do drilling platforms in BIM ....

[Tom W.]

1 hour ago, Kevin Allen said:

the difficulty will be in the thickness.

 

Yes you'd need to stack a load of thin extrudes on top of each other to get it to work, which kind of defeats the purpose...

[scottmoore]

Patrick,

Using the bump shader is probably the way to go.  I figured that out for a speaker grill I was working on a few months ago as a proof of concept.  As with so many things, I don't entirely recall how I did it, and reverse engineering didn't really help with trying to create your grid.  It's on the tip of my brian somewhere.  The point of the image below is this is a flat surface with a texture with the bump shader enabled.  It is not truly a 3 dimensional surface.  pretty much what you are looking to do except with hexagons.  

  

[Tom W.]

8 hours ago, scottmoore said:

pretty much what you are looking to do except with hexagons.  

 

Is it (or can it be) transparent?

 

On 10/5/2023 at 6:13 PM, Pat Stanford said:

I would like to be able to see through the openings in the grate.

[BartHays]

Here is a quick texture to try.

 

It is a single, untrimmed, NURBS surface with Displacement mapping:

 

Be sure to turn on displacement mapping in a Custom Renderworks Style
 

Note, that the images used are very much like @michaelk notes above. However, I added a thin black line around the Bump Map image so it "closes" the outside edge. Otherwise, it looks like the outer faces are transparent too. 

 

FRP.vwx

Edited October 23, 2023 by BartHays
update

[Pat Stanford]

Thanks @BartHays  That looks very good.

 

But like the one that I created using the Tile options in the Textures, It still has the problem of texturing both faces of an extrude which ends up making the rendering muddy.

 

So if I  was just doing a rendering I think your NURBS with texture would work well.  But I really want to use extrudes because I need the thickness for other views.

 

I guess I could make symbols and use just a top and the sides, but as soon as I start needing to cut the sheets to smaller sizes that is going to be a pain.

 

Thanks to all for the ideas.

[bcd]

Could you use the Texture Tool tool to apply the texture to the top only, with all other faces using a transparent texture?

[Pat Stanford]

Probably, but that still leaves me with the same issue that as soon as I have to go away from standard sized symbols I end up with a lot of extra work to have to texture the top, bottom, and edges separately.

 

For what I am doing right now, and the scales I am working at, I will just put up with the textures I am getting.

[scottmoore]

On 10/22/2023 at 1:12 AM, Tom W. said:

 

Is it (or can it be) transparent?

 

I believe so, but that is the part that reverse engineering was not helping me to figure out. 

[michaelk]

@Pat Stanford I made you a present 🙂 

 

 

(Couldn't get the round holes to work!)

 

[michaelk]

Hmmmm...  Keep the overall size of the grate small.  It fails in a hilarious way if it gets too big.  Or it just goes into an ifinite loop.

 

Oh well.

 

[Pat Stanford]

Thank you @michaelk  Is this for VW2024?  It has locked up on me trying to generate a 4' x 4' square of grate twice. Different SPs of 2024.  Had to force quit both times.

 

I put the VSO into my user folder. The Workspace Editor found it without any problem.

 

Any hints?

[Kevin K]

Pat

I am probably missing your overall intent from what you described...seems to me you could make a texture, that would work, but since you wish to see thru the 1" holes, I believe you would need to have some solid geometry. so the transparent areas for the texture would be problematic??  Again, I could be off base with totally understanding your intent, etc.

But...have you considered doing a surface array?? It is very simple and fast.  You just need to be cognizant of the overall math for the grate size(s)

Check it out... You can double click on the item to see how was constructed, and be mindful if tweaking is needed in the OIP.

 

Pat Grate v2024.vwx

[michaelk]

50 minutes ago, Pat Stanford said:

Thank you @michaelk  Is this for VW2024?  It has locked up on me trying to generate a 4' x 4' square of grate twice. Different SPs of 2024.  Had to force quit both times.

 

I put the VSO into my user folder. The Workspace Editor found it without any problem.

 

Any hints?

Yes it's for 2024.  I pulled it down before everyone gets to experience an infinite loop. 🙂   

If you draw a 10" x 10" grate it should work.  Or make the holes 6"x6" on a 4'x4' grate.

 

I tried doing it by clipping small rectangles from one large rectangle.  Couldn't make the clip work.

Then I just drew the rectangles between the holes.  Mostly works!  

 

"We don't write VW tools because they are easy to write.

We do it because we thought they would be easy to write."

 

One of these Saturday's we'll figure it out.

[michaelk]

This one works better and won't lock up your computer!

Works with both square and oval cutouts.

Until/IF we figure out why it's such a resource hog its size is limited.

 

I'll leave it as an exercise for greater minds to figure out the 2D.

Pats Grate 3.vso