2006 photoworks P2 woodgrain direction

i am pulling my hair out here. In material i can change direction of
wood. inside PW i can change the scale but not the direction i really
hope this is not a limitation of PW if so i will be really upset.

There is must be a work around or setting that i am missing can anyone
let me know. what this setting is for rotation

2006 sp 2.1

 

well i have played with this some more and i can get it to work with
some materials. but not the way i want it wood is very hard to get the
directions the proper scalling to work.


Now for all the photworks guys out there is there something out there
that is good and easy to take our SW out and render a scene with?

 

Sorry Ryan - I just checked on 2006, sp4, and a long running limitation
on procedural wood grain is still in place (as far as I can tell).

1st, (and you likely know this, but just in case...) there are two main
categories of materials that you can put on a model. Procedurals, and
textures.
The way to tell is whether the preview in the material manager is a
sphere or a square. Spherical preview = procedural. Square = texture.

PROCEDURALS are very cool because they are driven by some sort of
internal algorithm. You can change the color and secondary colors of
the grain, and you automatically get end grain and side grain.
However, you cannot (at least through 2006 as far as I can tell) change
the direction of the grain - it always runs from left to right on the
model (look at the right view, you see end grain - look at the front
view and the side grain runs from left to right).

Textures are made up of a photo that gets tiled repeatedly to make the
grain - you cannot tweak the color without editing that source photo.
With tiled materials you get repetition, which on large parts can be a
big deal - the repition jumps out obnoxiously. Side note, yet a tie-in
to real world manufacturing processes - my old man used to work for
Masonite creating paneling (along with other stuff), and through him I
learned that there is a limited diamater of the drum used to print the
fake grain. Every time the old man sits at a conference table he will
invariably try to find that 'tile' region. I find myself doing that to
kill time at my barber, who has a floor made of printed 'wood' material
(acorn and tree coments are obvious)

However, unlike Masonite which has a large drum and a team of talented
artists who try to obfuscate the repetition as much as possible, many
of the PWx materials tiled materials are small and show that repetition
so obviously that they are basically worthless except as a basic
indication of material, which, for business, can be enough - if you
are trying for 'realistic', you are not going to get it from many of
them ( apply the square pine texture to a part and note how bad it
comes across. On the other hand, beech aint too bad)
The other problem with textures is that you do not get decent endgrain
wiht default projection. If you project that texture from one
direction onto the part you can get what looks like perfectly quarter
sawn wood , but the side grain of the piece perpendicular to the
direction will just be a solid color (obvious workaround - add the
texture again to the side faces). In a pinch you can try to project a
tecture from a plane 45deg from the main axis of the part to get a
combination of face and side grain that might be passable.

So, what is the workflow for rendering wood?

1) Model all of your wood parts so that the length of the tree it was
cut from runs from left to right on the model. When I know a rendering
is necessary, this is what I do because the procedurals are actually
quite nice to work with. This also fits in with how I make in context
assemblies, so it isn't that large a burden (I always start the part to
the orientation that makes sense for that part and makes sense for its
drawing, then mate it into place. I hate working on parts set by
in-place mates, which might be at some crazy-ass angle to the base
planes for the part... but that is another thread, and something I will
talk about at next SWx World)

2) Make your own textures. If you have a camera and Photoshop, it is
easy. Choose a board with a rather ambiguous grain that won't show
obvious repitition (just like my old man did when directing photo
shoots when he was doing this professionally) and use the offset filter
in P-shop to help blend the tile region (this is a great tip from a
Biasotti PWx presentation at SWx World 2000 - it, or an analogue, is
likely out on the web somewhere if you root around a little). I did
this once with the floor of a basketball court for a display I worked
on back in my display days - just get the biggest photo you can manage.
I do not know right now what the limit is for a texture size, but i
recall it was pretty large.

Of course, 2007 might eliminate the need for all of these workarounds,
but I don't have it loaded here.

Good Luck, and I hope something here helps

Ed 'blahblah' Eaton.

 

AFAIK you can only change the direction by changing the orientation of
your model. I'm not sure if you can use move/copy but it's worth
testing.

For a good scene setup you should move to SW2007. The default scenes
with HDR-background are much better to control (reflection and
brightness).

HTH,
Ralf