Texture Requests (from a playground design company)

[Jonny S]

Hi,

I work for a company that designs playgrounds and have thought of a few tools that would be very useful to us.

1. Merge Textures

We have a library of products that has been built up in the company over a few years. Several different textures for wood/etc/have been created.

These products are in one file, and we are now converting them to symbols. These will also all be in the same file.

When I look in the resource browser, there are several of the same textures but all named differently. If I want to change the wood texture (for example) for all models, I have to change every instance of it in the resource browser.

To fix this I'd have to delete all textures but one, re-apply the textures and then make sure they were all positioned correctly.

Could there be a merge function? This leads me on to...

2. Randomise Texture Positioning

A lot of our products are built from wood, and so we have wood panelling/beams. If I want to texture a product, I'll select all the panels and apply the texture.

The problem with this is that I get horrible repeating (patterning) of the textures on adjacent beams.

I then have to go through selecting each panel, and then type in random digits into the 'offset h/offset v' settings box in the Object info panel so that you are not seeing the same texture on each beam.

These would really help! Or maybe I'm missing something?

Thanks,

Jon.

[VincentCuclair]

Hi Jon! Welcome to the forum

Please add a signature with your VWs and PC specs, it makes it easier to help you if we see what you're working with.

To answer your questions:

1. There is no merge or replace function for textures unfortunately however it has been wished for, we'll need to wait a day or two to see if it made it to the coming version....

https://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=40544&Number=200928#Post200928

2. I don't think there is a solution for this, however if I recall correctly there have been wishes along those lines, so again we'll have to wait a couple of days to see if it has been inttroduced in the new version.

[Art V]

Regarding point 2, unless I am mistaken displacement maps should take care of repeating patterns to become visible. They do have it for grass etc. but don't know if it is also available for other textures.

You may want to check the Arroway textures that are availabe for VSS subscribers as they claim their textures are seamless so that you won't see the pattern repeating.

[Jonny S]

No, I'm not talking about seamless textures and what not. Neither do we have the time for rendering displacements.

What I'm talking about is having lots of wood beams (separate objects) next to each other, all textured with the same wood texture.

If there is a knot in the wood texture, it will be in the same place for all the objects next to it, and so I have to change the positioning of the texture across all the objects. That could be 100's per model.

Imagine some floorboards, all individually modelled. If I select them all and texture them with a wood texture, a knot will appear on ALL objects in the same position.

Thus you get repeating textures... I want to be able to randomise how it maps the texture to the object.

[Markvl]

Textures can be great if there put together correctly. Making them seamless is a huge start, but even if they are seamless, if the image itself is not very big and there are spots (like a knot in wood) you will see that knot repeated. Perhaps Jonny S this is what you don't want. Stone veneer textures can be bad for this. Seamless, great, to small and large stones in the texture repeat to often; not great. But like others have hinted here there is no automatic way to avoid your situation and unfortunately you will have to continue adjusting each piece as needed. Considering your product, there will be plenty of times where pieces are going to be custom and others, standard off the shelf stuff. Make the off the shelf stuff symbols, so they are the same every time you insert them.

Hoping to that there will be further improvements in the upcoming version for using textures.

Cheers!

[PVA - Admin]

Adding this thread to a previous request on texture replacement.

[Art V]

Jonny S, now I get what your issue is, yes I can see why that would be annoying. Theoretically this could be solved if the origin of the texture would be at some point in the document and then the 3D position of the object would cause a "shift" in the texture so that the knot would not appear on the same place in the beams. However, if the origin of the texture would be relative to the "origin" of the object then you would run into the issue you are describing.

Markvl's mentioned texture repeat issue is the other one you can run into and that I've come across more often.

Jim, could you please provide a link to the previous request if you have that at hand? I'm interested in seeing what the issue is in that request.

[PVA - Admin]

There are quite a few in this request now, heres some of the more recent ones:

https://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=211983

https://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=204128

https://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=199208

There are more but unfortunately they were logged before I started double-linking forum post numbers to the requests themselves, so I cant call them back up easily. The above are not all the main discussions that were recently had on this topic, I'll keep looking.

[Art V]

Jim, thanks for the links, only the first one is somewhat about what I was looking for.

My possible issue is one of large areas and I was wondering what would be an optimal texture size (in pixels) where repeating patterns would not be so visible while not having really long render times due to the (file) size of the texture. The option to scale the texture as mentioned in the first link would partially solve this as I don't want huge file size textures either.

[rDesign]

No, I'm not talking about seamless textures and what not. Neither do we have the time for rendering displacements.

What I'm talking about is having lots of wood beams (separate objects) next to each other, all textured with the same wood texture.

If there is a knot in the wood texture, it will be in the same place for all the objects next to it, and so I have to change the positioning of the texture across all the objects. That could be 100's per model.

Imagine some floorboards, all individually modelled. If I select them all and texture them with a wood texture, a knot will appear on ALL objects in the same position.

Thus you get repeating textures... I want to be able to randomise how it maps the texture to the object.

I think what Jonny S is looking for is Cinema4D's 'Multi Shader' or the new 'Variation Shader' which was just introduced in R17.

Both of which would be a welcome addition to Renderworks.

In short, the 'Multi Shader' allows you to load up a material with multiple textures and have the textures be assigned randomly to the various objects.