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Author Topic: Tile hung wall with openings and random colour variation  (Read 2074 times)

JTP Vis

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Tile hung wall with openings and random colour variation
« on: October 30, 2015, 06:32:49 PM »
Hi,

I'm trying to make a Tile hung wall using railclone. I thought it should be do-able with a 2s array, but I've hit a few problems.

What I'm trying to achieve is offset tiles on a vertical surface through which I would like to punch window holes. I would like to make this railclone be able to go around the corners of a building also. I wanted to be able to draw the outline of the plan of the building with one spline, draw the height of the building or wall with another spline, then punch holes through the resulting walls.

Problem 1: I've made a single tile, and I can get it to be simply arrayed vertically, but when I try to offset it I can't get it to fill the gaps it creates when I offset every second row.

Problem 2: I need to be able to cut openings in the walls to insert windows, but I can't make the holes work

Problem 3: in trying to solve problem 1 I created a half offset base object, which looks fine a base geometry, but I also want to apply randomly 3 variant materials to give a randomisation of colour. By making the base object split I now cannot randomise the material ids as it colours halves of tiles on the offset rows.

The effect I'm trying to achieve is like that of the "Walsall art gallery" (google image search "walsall art gallery terracotta tiles").

I trust with all the expertise at iToo that as usual there is a solution out there, and look forward to seeing what you suggest.

Cheers all,

Bill


Paul Roberts

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Re: Tile hung wall with openings and random colour variation
« Reply #1 on: November 01, 2015, 09:46:38 PM »
Hi Bill,

Please see the attached file, I hope it answers your questions.

Quote
Problem 1:I've made a single tile, and I can get it to be simply arrayed vertically, but when I try to offset it I can't get it to fill the gaps it creates when I offset every second row.
I've created two tiles, one full width and another half width. These are alternated vertically in the Left and Right inputs to create the offset rows using a Sequence operator. The default input uses just the full width tile and the Default mode is set to Adaptive to ensure no tiles are sliced at the start and ends.

Quote
Problem 2: I need to be able to cut openings in the walls to insert windows, but I can't make the holes work
RailClone only allows you to cut holes using splines on a single axis. If you need to cut holes on multiple axis you will need to divide the building into several RailClone objects and change the Clipping Area > Projection axis accordingly. You'll find more information about this in Chapter 6 of our Next Steps with RailClone guide. Alternative, if you're a V-Ray user you could use a single RailClone object and create solid objects to represent the wall apertures. These can then be used with V-Ray Distance Texture maps to perform a render-time boolean. You can read more about this "cheat" in this post.

Quote
Problem 3: in trying to solve problem 1 I created a half offset base object, which looks fine a base geometry, but I also want to apply randomly 3 variant materials to give a randomisation of colour. By making the base object split I now cannot randomise the material ids as it colours halves of tiles on the offset rows.

By creating a full tile and a half tile and applying them only where relevant you should be able to avoid this problem. Please see the attached file for a demo.

I hope that helps, if anything needs clarifying or you have further questions please let me know.

Many thanks!

Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software