3D gravel, grass, mulch

[Bruce Kieffer]

Has anyone created these objects? Are you willing to share your creations?

[CipesDesign]

Bruce, are you looking for Textures?

[Bryan G.]

Peter I was talking to Bruce and maybe the "seipe" plugin would work. do you know the link.

[Bruce Kieffer]

No. I need objects to populate a scene rendered hidden line.

[CipesDesign]

Hmm. Interesting request. Those a re very small objects and might be tedious to work with individually (like blades of grass?). I assume you're looking for larger, already 'grouped' arrangements? Can you post a quick example??

FWIW, that's one of the reasons I use a dual mode VP for many things. That way I can show textures (like grass, bark, etc) and hard edge (hidden) lines at the same time.

[Bruce Kieffer]

The drawing attached needs to have gravel under the horizontal framing members.

[CipesDesign]

Maybe try a Stipple, a Hatch or Paving Pattern? Here are a few from my collection. Most of my good ones were created by myself or other users. You may need to play with them a bit as they are not 3d and may not look right being 'flat' (unrotated). But they might be useful...

[mike m oz]

Bruce, if you can find a gravel hatch you can apply it to a planar 2D shape placed at the required elevation.

There are some Autocad gravel hatches but the problem is most of them are only available as .pat files so you need to use them in a DWG drawing, save the file and then import that into Vw.

An easier option might be to find a black and white linewoork image of gravel and map that onto a planar 2D shape placed at the required elevation.

[Bruce Kieffer]

Thanks Peter. They might just do the trick. Makes me think I don't really need 3D objects, just 2D layer plane objects that give the illusion of gravel, grass, and mulch.

[CipesDesign]

You're welcome. Post back with results?

[Bruce Kieffer]

WIll do. It will be a while, maybe months.

[Monadnoc]

Arrowway has a new gravel texture set out that also includes models with actual 3d geometry. It looks pretty cool. But the models only come in .max and .obj format, neither of which VW can import (nothing can import a .max file except 3ds Max). But you can still use the textures in VW (or the .obj models if you have Cinema 4d). Here's the link:

http://www.arroway-textures.com/en/products/gravel-1

For grass I have had decent results with the old gamer trick of using billboards (image props) scattered all over the place. We don't really have a good way to randomize size, distribution and rotation in VW, but if you keep the view angle low you can get a usable result (unfortunately, this technique won't work for hidden line rendering, which is what you're after). Here's an example:

Edited March 29, 2013 by Monadnoc