2006 photoworks P2 woodgrain direction

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