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Archive for October 10th, 2008

This is a free plug-in for SolidWorks, offered by Print 3D Corporation. I learned about it just last night, and I wanted to share with you here because it does seem like a great tool that can save your sanity, as well as your time and money.  Print 3D allows SolidWorks users to get secure and offline quotes for plastic and metal prototypes directly from SolidWorks, without having to upload any STL files to service bureaus and then get pestered by their representatives, trying to get your business.  With Print 3D, users can obtain quotes any time they need to, as many times as they need to, without ever compromising to actually order or buy anything, until they are absolutely sure that’s what they want. Isn’t this something? I mean, with this service, you can actually obtain a price for every single change you make to your design. This can aid you tremendously in making a decision if cost is a priority for you. No hassle, just click a button and there you have it! And when you are ready, just order your parts, and they will deliver them to your door, usually the next day. This sounds easier than ordering pizza!  What do you think? Too easy? Have you tried it yet?

For more information about Print3D, the kind of prototyping services that they offer, and for downloading the plug-in totally free of charge, visit their website at: www.print3Dcorp.com and then tell me what you think about it.

If you’ve ever attempted to layout a tile floor at home or create a garment out of a piece of plaid fabric, then you may have an idea of what editing and mapping textures in PhotoWorks feels like, and, especially in the case of the garment, how difficult it is at times to make the plaid pattern match exactly at the seams. You usually need extra fabric for that! Lucky for us, in PhotoWorks we don’t need extra of anything, we just need to learn how to map the texture and a bit of patience. 

Unlike procedural appearances, textures are 2D images that are applied to surfaces pretty much like wallpaper. PhotoWorks allows us to stretch, shrink, rotate, and reorient the texture in order to fit the surface and to make it match or look better with textures applied to other surfaces of the same model.  Doing so is what’s known as mapping a texture, and it usually involves a bit of hard work, but can be very rewarding because it certainly improves the look and quality of our rendered image. In the following image, a texture was applied to the whole part. The mapping was automatic in this case, but the texture can be edited and its rotation, size, and orientation modified.

Mapping a texture on a flat surface may just be the easiest of all the texture mapping you’re ever going to do. First, go to the render manager in PhotoWorks and right click on the texture you wish to edit to open the appearances property manager. Select Mapping, Advanced, and you will find something very similar to what’s shown in the following image, where the blue and pink rectangle represents the size of the texture element, which is, by the way, getting tiled all over the surface.

In the property manager, you can change the numerical values of the width and height of this texture element, thus making the size of the pattern appear larger or smaller, like in this image.

You can also move the texture element horizontally or vertically across the surface, by adjusting the offset values (green and red arrows) in the property manager.

This is my kind of mapping! It’s not so complicated. It would be perfect if textures needed to be applied only on flat surfaces, but sometimes we are going to need to apply textures to cylindrical and spherical surfaces as well, or to weird shaped surfaces, and that’s when it gets a bit complicated. Not impossible, just complicated. I guess it takes a lot of practice. I find myself relying a lot on trial and error, but I hope someday soon I’ll develop some sort of instinct that at least will provide me with an enhanced ability to guess.

When mapping a texture on a cylindrical surface, we are going to find that the appearance property manager offers very similar options to what we had before with the flat surface.  Same as before, we can change the width and height of the texture element, rotate it, and translate it up and down along the axis of the cylinder.

If we change the rotation angle, we can achieve the following effect.

Cylinders are OK, still not extremely complicated. Spheres however are a bit tough, at least for me.  Spherical mapping offers even more options in the appearance manager, and so now we can alter the width and height of the texture element, its rotation angle, and the orientation of the pattern poles. Here in the following image, for instance, I’m reorienting the pattern pole to be at 39 degrees from the Y axis.

As a curious note, I tried to create a mapping exercise with PhotoView 360, to compare, but there was no way to edit anything else about a texture other than its scale.

I can see that mapping is all about practice and more practice, patience and taste. I think I’m not doing so badly. I was able to solve all the exercises in the guide and I think they turned out really good. Seriously, if you want to learn how to map a texture, among many other interesting things, you should really consider the Step-by-Step PhotoWorks guide. I love this book!  I’m learning a lot from it, and enjoying the process too.