PW2 - Suggestions for perforated stainless sheet ?

I had to do something similar once when I had to create a 2' x 4' section of egg-crate grating for a light fixture. It really brought the system to its knees. If you only have a small part to punch the holes in it might not be so bad. If it is real bad, could you create a sketch of the holes and just show the sketch without cutting the holes?

Bruce B.

In my experience, there are two main ways to go:

1) If you want to use a texture (an image based material that tiles an image you provide automatically so you don't need to know what size your final surface is) I saw one of my clever old coworkers (Mr Dave H) get some good results from using a semi-transparent material, with the 'texture' being a repeatable pattern of white areas with black dots (or whatever shape your perf is). It is enough to trick your audiences eyes - they can see through the material, but the dark spots provide some occlusion. This was good enough for suggesting pegboard, perf metal, and expanded metal screens, all of which are used heavily in the Point of Purchase industry that I used to work in. And remember, what you are trying to do is communicate your intent with any rendering that you do. It is a nice, simple solution 2) Me preferred method, however, involves you knowing the size of the area you are going to cover - * and * it involves being able to use an image editing package, like PhotoShop (or Paintshop pro, etc) What you need to do is create a solid image of the material base color that is the exact aspect ratio as the area you want to fill - it is the same X wide and the same Y high. Let's say you are doing a black speaker grill - this image will be solid black, or better yet, a 90-95% grey (so the shadows have somewhere to get darker, depending of course on how you like to set the diffuse and specular values for your materials). Then, you create a second image with the perforation pattern you want. You need round holes? Put a bunch of black dots on a white background. Need them to be triangular? A bunch of triangular shapes on a white background. Now comes the fun. Save the first image (the solid color) as, for example, "decal_perf_solid". Then save the second image as "decal_perf_mask". Next, make the base material for your screen something see-through - I tend to go with a translucent or dielectric material whose color is set to pure white (so light passes through it without any tinting). You have created a solid mass of air. Then I apply a decal, with a mask, on top of it. "decal_perf_solid" is the solid part, and "decal_perf_mask" are the holes. Please note that you can change the illumination properties of decals to match surrounding materials or any material you like (last time I did this I made my decal material a steel that looked awesome). What is cool here is that the decal renders fast, and that the shadows cast by the hole sin the decal are accurate (or at least used to be- haven't tried in the latest version). For instance, if you were doing camouflage netting with this technique, the netting would cast realistic shadows on the machinery of death hiding underneath.

There may be a third option, though I have no experience with it. Looking at the options in 2007 (I won't check 2006 because, heck, you can do that while I simply retire to bed) there is material option at the top of the illumination tab called "cut hole with decal". If that works for you, please report back to the forum.

Summation: Option 1 is easy, but I have had trouble in the past getting the scale to be the same when that material is applied to objects of different sizes. Option 2 requires just a tad more up-front work, but I got the perf patterns dead on right away, and they were beautiful. Option 3 I will keep in mind to test for the next time I have to do this sort of work.

All I know is that all three options blow the door off of option four, which is to model the perforations. On a 36' gondola run of 1" pegboard (again, POP days), you could waste an otherwise good weekend trying to update and render your model.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes Ed

One of the problemsis that the steel panel is huge and curved. I took stainless polished and added a dimpled pattern to it. It is a raised pattern but at that distance and size it isnt noticable. It looks like is has a pattern on it and it also looks like a depression versus raised. It isnt perfect but it seems to do the job.