heyas; exhibit a, on the left: an attempt to make a mortared stone wall kinda texture. the armory in baltimore had a really cool texture of big rock chunks in mortar; they really stuck out from the wall. this is what i'm attempting to capture here. i'm doing okay, i think, but i cant figure out how to make the stones bigger and the spaces between the mortar smaller. how do i get the white/black parts of the function to shrink and grow at my whim? ;) exhibit b, on the right: this is proceedural brick texture i managed to come up with, and i was real proud of it, too. er, then this morning i remembered that bricks are laid in offset rows. in ray dream there is a way to make a checkerboard of offset stripes to do this, but how in vue...? also need help with some wood textures. (or to be inundated with some wood texture collections ;) ) and, finally... i made some new directories under the vue materials directory, but they dont show up as categories in the materials loader. same deal for objects. dont tell me i'm stuck with only those few categories! :(

Hello, for the textures I can't help you for now, but for the directories I think I can :when you make new directories, you'll have to declare it (works for objects, textures and atmosphres) : go in the texture window(where all textures can be seen) : below the list of categories, you must find "new" "del" "file" buttons (I don't remember the english version : I work in french version now, but it's something like that) : click on "new" go to the directory you want, pick a file : now you are able to make a new category, and when it opens all the files that were in the directory are usable. Bye, Xavier Taris

ohhhh.... new category! i didnt know THAT! thanks! :)

www.woodworking.org/WC/woodsampler.html has some wonderful pictures of any wood you want. hope that works for you. Marge

heyas; okay, i figured it out. you use the brick as a repeating tile! that's okay, then. duh. now just one more 'duh' question... how do i get the fool bricks to be horizontal? they're all standing up on end! i tried rotating the texture, and if i put it at x=90 one side is good... but the other two sides turn into ghastly streaks. :/ (i guess i have to go rotate the bitmap 90 degrees?) actually, the streaks still occur if i make the texture object-spaced and rotate the object. (hope i never have to make any flying brick things! ;) ) also did the same thing for my mortared stone. cruised the vue web ring listing like a vulture this morning, looking for goodies, and scored some nice textures and things. ;) but i still want to know how to make the function blobs bigger or smaller -- or more or less contrasty, or to grow/shrink them... you know what i mean. (i hope.) and how to make some decent woodgrain. dont particularly want a picture of wood, quess. :)

I recall a procedural wood texture (oak I think) in one of the Vue directories (can't remember which) If you have a look at how that's done you might be able to tweak it's properties into a different looking wood. I've never seen a procedural wood that looks quite like real wood tho.

I tried fussing with the filters & functions and such on the "oak" procedural in Vue. You can get some decent woodgrains if you fiddle with it enough. Mess around with EVERYTHING in the materials editor. Try using other filters and functions, adjust scale, amplitude etc. Once you figure out what effect they have on your texture you can make a good guess as to what you need to change.

heya; i've been messing with that oak material, but... :/ at least i figured out how to rotate the texture to get the grain to run down the x or y axis. change the x/y/z origins to 90. to get different directions.

I had the most trouble with the colors & the width of the grain. I found a decent dark wood color but kinda gave up on getting the grain to look right.

heya; yeah, the grain needs to be more... varied. i think it needs more layers and tweaking. i'll have to get out my ray dream book and see how they made a really nice polished wood texture by mixing several layers, and see if i can translate it into vue methods. the trick to 'realistic' shaders (materials) is to use many subtle layers. one dark and light brown gradient on a single wood function won't cut it.

If you find a good "recipe" please post it on the Vue Freestuff. I'd like to have a decent procedural woodgrain myself.