creating new materials lightworks

[Anonymous]

I have some various jpeg textures that I want to make into new materials and use with lightworks rendering. I am able to get the new materials working OK with openGL, but with lightworks the process of creating them seems to be confusing to me.

First off, I need to pick something 'similar' to duplicate. The original material may have associated images or not, even when I add my images, the end material doesn't look similar when rendered. I've been tweaking the parameter settings but no luck.

Is there an easy way to come up with a rough stucco like surface based on an image? Is there a good source for documentation on the various parameters under lightworks shader settings?

Help is greatly appreciated....

[TomWaltz]

Your best bet for Lightworks documentation is Dwight Atkinson's book. There are a couple tidbits in the Archicad user manual, but hardly enough to do anything with it.

[Dwight]

Photos as stucco textures have drawbacks because roughness is defined by shadows, not image. Stucco is painted a uniform color.....

Seamless textures of uniform effects like stucco are extremely difficult to create since any fluctuation of lighting in the original image is evident in the tiled texture image.

In the case of stucco, instead, you should consider using the LightWorks Displacement shader "Rough" or "Casting" to produce the texture. However, this will be useful only in LightWorks, since OpenGL and the Infernal Engine only use image textures.

Many users export a rendered image of their manufactured shaders to stand in with the OpenGL and the Infernal engine.

[Anonymous]

Dwight thanks for the tips. One thing I should explain is the stucco surface I'm going for is not a uniform color. It is a finish where the cement is mixed with die (paintless surface) and gives kind of a rustic blended look. I would like to be able to do this with some various photographed surfaces, if possible, trying to capture both the texture and color variations.

[Dwight]

This isn't an Archicad question.
This is a general howdoimakeaphototexture question.
Try some internet searches on pixel blending and seamless texture building.

[Anonymous]

it is probably 'a user that doesn't know squat about lightworks in ArchiCad and should buy the book question' (which I may do yet). I say this because when I take the photo, or any other texture I have and create the new material as OpenGL it looks perfect (when viewed in 3D openGL or rendered as Internal Engine). OK, there is some tiny tiling effect, but not really noticeable. The problem comes in when I switch to LightWorks Rendering Engine and try to fill out the parameters. Since I can't find an exact shader to use, I must guess. I have one which comes fairly close as Colour = Wrapped Image = jpeg image, Reflectance = Wrapped Woven Anisotropic, Transparancy = None, Displacement = Wrapped Bump Map = image, Texture Space = none, Pipeline = none. While this looks 'pretty good', it comes out more purple than the original and I'm not sure how to tweak it (since the color is coming from the photo).

I would like to try the rough and casting shaders as you suggest, so I can compare the effects. Where do I pull up the shaders, are they located under the archive section, under which I have 5 archives, ray tracing.lwa,architectural.lwa, essential.lwa, basic.lwa and industrial.lwa (each with various shaders).

[Dwight]

The bad news for me is that if you think that any photo you take works well with just a little tiling effect and don't mind that, [Sense my distain.] you probably don't have the visual aptitude to exploit the "LightWorks in Archicad" book.

The shader i refer to specifically is the "rough" displacement shader to introduce texture.

You can also use your image as a displacement map to simulate similar contouring suggested by the photo.

Anisotropic is a waste of time because that is brushed metal - too fine to affect an architectural scene. The author Henry Miller invented that shader by describing it in his book "The Anisotropic of Cancer."

Archives contain completed materials - i refer instead to shaders as the individual adjustments in the material dialog.