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Making a realistic texture. How?


7ouis

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Hello,

I am Louis from holland and i am pretty new to vectorworks. We use the program at school, but we have no teacher at the moment that gives us lessons in vectorworks. So i am trying to teach myself.

I saw that there is a site with some free textures. I am trying to use nr24 from the classic floors: http://www.arroway-textures.com/textures/04/freemaps/wood-24.zip

I am trying to make the texture look as realistic as in the picture. But i cant do it for a reason it doesn't look good :(

So my question is how do you make it as realistic as the picture on the site with vectorworks? What do i have to do in the texture-panel.

The realistic one:

http://www.arroway-textures.com/textures/04/demos/demo_wood-24.jpg

Thanks in advance

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Wow fast reply =]

Version 12.5 . I am doing loads of trial and error attempts, doesnt seem to work for me and with radiosity all my other furniture looks less in compare with renderworks-final. So much lighter it all is.

I can upload a picture of what i have if needed. <- Added a picture of what i have in renderworks-final.

Edited by 7ouis
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You probably need to reduce the number of lights in the scene. You don't need nearly as many, or as strong, lights in a radiosity rendering as you do for Final Qual RW.

Go ahead and post an image.

The other image posted looks like the room is either illuminated with an area light in the window, or a sun source placed outside the room

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For a Radiosity setting to work well, you want to close off the room and use a perspective view looking into the room. Otherwise, the energy just keeps going on - it doesn't bounce off surfaces.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Hello 7ouis, and welcome!

1. What is your ambient setting - in the view->Lighting options dialog? You may want to turn this way down (<10%) or off until you get the lighting adjusted.

2. Try giving your lights a non-None distance falloff. This should help a lot with realism.

3. Also, you may want to try using Custom Radiosity with Auto-Adjust Exposure turned off until you get the lighting values in the ballpark, otherwise it will be difficult to figure out if some lights are too dim or too bright. My guess from this rendering is that the lights are very dim, because the floor texture has been boosted to where it is very cartoony-looking.

You can post mcd and vwx files to this forum if you want more help.

Edited by Dave Donley
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Thanks for the reply Dave.

I have put out the ambient setting. and gave my lamps a distance falloff. It looks a bit more realistic but not near the picture from arroway.

I will add my mcd file also. You maybe you can have a look when you have the time. And also another picture from what i have now.

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Oh and by: Custom Radiosity with Auto-Adjust Exposure. I dont know what you mean by this cause my vectorworks is completely in dutch ^^ maybe you got a screenshot for what i have to put out/on.

And also thanks for your replys Pat. I will make a window in my next rendering.

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You may have done this already (though it doesn't appear so from the jpg), but be sure to use the reflectivity and bump maps that come with the high-quality Arroway textures, not just the diffuse (image) map. Also, the downloadable texture is 600 by 600 pixels, while the one from CD (and certainly the one used in their demo) is 6000 by 6000 pixels!

The downside is your rendering times will increase a lot, and the floor texture will stand out as "more real" if the other textures aren't up to the same level.

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Thank you all for being so kind to help me out.

As you can see making the texture is not my only problem. But also rendering with radiosity. Since that one is pretty new to me. I have used all 3 images as you can see when you edit my texture in my .mcd file.

Still the pixels on cd may be 10times as much. But still my render should be way better than this.

Here another picture with a window in it making not much of a difference.

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Unfortunately, I can't open a student file with a pro edition...

As others have implied, rendering with radiosity (and w/o as well) takes time to learn/control/perfect. Have you used learning resources from NNA? Dan Jansenson's book? etc...

Have you tried using RW Camera for a more satisfying "perspective"?

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Oh shoot - it's a VW 2008 file. I'll save it back as a VW 12 file.

I have a light outside the room, and one on the inside of the room. I turned on ambient lighting.

You may want to check out Dan Jansensen's RenderWorks book. It lays the foundation for understanding and use RenderWorks.

Edited by Katie
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Here is my attempt with Custom Rad and Katie's piano scene. In 2008 you can use final gather and I would but since you're using 12.5 I tried radiosity alone. This is what worked here:

1. I reimported the wood images from arroway, used the "d" for image color, "r" for image reflectivity, and "b" for bump. I set the texture size to something like 2 meters, not sure what this is supposed to be. The reflectivity didn't start out great. I set the mirror factor to zero, turned up diffuse to 100%, and I think set specular to a lower %. For bump I tried smaller values of amplitude, I think it ended up around 0.005 to give just a little dip in the gaps between the wood planks.

2. For lighting an interior with radiosity in 12.5, I used area lights in the windows that match the window glazing. To make these lights, go to a side view and create a rectangle that fits just inside the mullions for each window. It is alright if every pane is not modeled, the goal is to get a defocused soft light. The two rectangles were converted to area lights (Modify->Convert->Convert to Area Light). I turned off show geometry in the light options, the brightness is set to 4000 lux for each window. The lights were grouped then moved in plan until the lights float just in front of the muliions for the window; you don't want the small parts of the window interfering with the lights because this will throw noisy shadows all over the room. I also had to flip the light directions as they were aimed outside instead of into the room. The area lights are very pale blue. The directional light from Katie was set to 4000 lux as well to represent sunlight. The point light in the original file was deleted.

3. I turned off ambient. It is very difficult to get a handle on the light brightnesses with ambient on and since the rendering will show indirect lighting the need for an ambient light is reduced. Ambient tends to just make everything gray and/or flat.

4. Did some test renderings in FastRW and Final Quality RW to see the light brightness without auto exposure on, to make sure the lighting wasn't dim. The piano appeared grayish, so I turned all the piano texture's Mirror shaders' parameters way down so the piano appeared glossy black.

5. Changed to Custom Radiosity render mode, and in the Custom Rad Options dialog, turned on the Show Color-coded Preview option to see the triangle sizes and get a sense of the inclusion and detail sizes. Too many objects were gray, not many of the small objects were red or black, so turned down the Obj Inclusion value to help avoid work on the small objects and improve speed. Adjusted the Init Detail to get triangles that would represent the area lights finely enough but not too finely. Set the Energy slider above 90%, because I wanted this to run long enough to splash light back onto the windows' wall and this can take awhile as the floor is a dark texture.

6. The big speed gains for radiosity with this scene were to eliminate the piano's black texture from radiosity and to use the visible surfaces only option. The piano is black and has the most complicated geometry in this model. Since it is black it will never produce significant indirect lighting. Since the floor is very dark too I wondered if this model should even use radiosity; we want the indirect lighting at the walls and windows, though. Turning off radiosity emit and receive for this black texture removes the entire piano from the radiosity processing which helps the render time a lot. Also, since the rest of the room is not really significant to this scene, the Include Visible Surfaces Only Custom Radiosity option was used to eliminate the non-visible rest of the room from the radiosity processing.

7. The radiosity was run until the wash of light onto the windows' wall was visible, then I pressed ESC and accepted the solution.

Doing and interior with final gather and no radiosity is another option, but I am waiting for the next maintenance release to spell out that procedure. The gist is that to do interiors in the next maintenance release, you will only need an HDRI, an optional directional light for the sun, and final gather.

HTH,

Edited by Dave Donley
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Wow very nice. I didnt know people could be so helpfull =]. Really helped me alot in understanding vectorworks better. Still there is much to learn. I think with alot of reading of these forums and sometimes a specific question i can grow enormously in skill. I hope i can be of help soon! ! ! :D

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Hi Dave

Excellent render.

I have to agree with islandmond though. Those thick black lines around the window is always a worry for renderworks and as you said to get rid of them, you have to increase the accuracy or detail which both increases the time.

I also noticed there is NO sun shadows although you have a sun outside. If one has to turn off the area lights then the sun shows through. Looks like area lights and normal lights can't co-exist. What's with that?

It's because of these inconsistencies that I've chosen the C4D route.

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