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Author Topic: How do I generate Portuguese tiles?  (Read 1853 times)

EI4006

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How do I generate Portuguese tiles?
« on: July 20, 2016, 04:30:42 PM »
Good afternoon all,

I need to generate a Portuguese type of paving pattern within irregular boundaries, the tiles would need to always have 4 sides. The tiles would need to adapt to the boundary edge, something like the referenced images.

Also, would it be possible to get a calculation from Railclone of exactly how many tiles I have used within a boundary.

Hope you can help.

Martin

Paul Roberts

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Re: How do I generate Portuguese tiles?
« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2016, 08:19:31 PM »
Hi Martin,

This is very tricky because the tiles have to fit into and follow irregular shapes, but RC is based on regular grids that may not play well with this style. To do the job properly I feel it might need some kind of packing algorithm. That said I've attached a sample file with a few approaches that may be helpful, be aware though that all these have the limitation of a fixed grid. 



The first idea uses a purely RailClone approach, with an L1S generator used to define the outside edge and an A2S generate set to clipping mode to fill in between as shown below.



As you can see though the infill does not rotate to follow the direction of the boundaries. However if this is important it is something we can do with Forest Pack. Using Forest's new Effects feature I can write a little script that rotate the tiles to face towards the nearest include area.



The script used for this is a adaptation of the the Look at Boundary with Falloff effect that ship with Forest Pack 5, To change the colours in this example I have added a surface with different Material IDs, one for colour and then added the spline 6 times. Each time the area is added it adds a different coloured item by using Forest's Select Models by Area and Limit to Surface Material ID features.



The issue with this technique is that you loose the nicely define boundaries that we saw in RailClone, so the 3rd example combines both plugins. RailClone is used to create the borders and Forest Pack fills in the area and allows the tiles to rotate to follow the boundaries.



To pull the Forest objects away from the edges a little to make space for the RC object you can use the Density Falloff feature that's found in the areas rollout. A stepped graph will give you a hard finish instead of a gradual fading out of tiles.



I hope that helps, if I can think of another approach I'll update this post but please let me know if you have any further questions.

Many Thanks,

Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

Rokas

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Re: How do I generate Portuguese tiles?
« Reply #2 on: July 21, 2016, 08:48:11 AM »
This deserves separate video tutorial, great stuff !
Rokas

EI4006

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Re: How do I generate Portuguese tiles?
« Reply #3 on: July 21, 2016, 10:31:57 AM »
Wow!.. amazing Paul, thanks for such a thorough response - I've passed this onto my colleague who's actually the one trying to create this - thanks also for supplying the .max file