Texture Archicad
Texture Archicad
Today we’re going to do a very quick exercise to create custom surfaces and materials in ARCHICAD and CineRender, the new render engine included in ARCHICAD since version 18.This render engine comes from CINEMA 4D, a very powerful 3D modeling, animation and rendering application developed by MAXON Computer.In my opinion the 2 features of this new render engine that have made ARCHICAD become a serious player in the field of Architectural Visualisation are the Global Illumination and the surface layer system. Before version 18 surfaces used to be composed by a single layer providing the colour information (the image of the material for example a wood texture or a tile) and you could apply some other properties for the texture as reflection, luminance, alpha but the control of all this other properties was very limited and very simple.Mainly because of that, the most usual way to get profesional renders was, once finished the AC model, export the file to another rendering software. Cinema 4D, 3Dmax, Artlantis, Octane render among others, have great connection already with AC.New textures inside CineRender work with a layer system, called usually “channels” that are used to build the textures in the profesional software packages. This “channels” are just a more sophisticated way to use those old properties as reflection, refraction, bump, displacement, alphaThe more channels a texture has, the better it usually looks.
Those channels describe the physical properties of the materials and can be developed so much and in such a complex way that some people live out of doing and selling this textures.This packages can be found in many internet stores and most of the times have the particular formats of the different softwares but one good thing is that usually also contain the different image layers independently.Some websites offer free downloads of this textures, or libraries of free textures shared by the user community. One of this websites is this the, they offer a library of FREE shared textures created by the users world wide, with generally great quality. What kind of channels do you have to look for?Depending on the kind of the texture you’re creating, there are different channels that you but in general the basics for the material creation are the colour channel, a bump and a reflection channel.
For transparent materials a refraction and Alpha channel are common too.After downloading the layers we go to ARCHICAD and open the surface attribute window. There we go to “NEW” and in this case we go to duplicate one. We will change the name and probably everything inside the material, but anyway I like to chose a similar material because sometimes might have any internal setup that can be useful to help us with the new material. Next important thing we need to know is the difference between the render engines. The internal render engine controls the display of the materials in the 3D view. The CineRender does it for the rendered images. We will create the new material textures in the CineRender engine and when the setup is finished we will make it match with the internal engine, in order to preview the changes in the AC window.We see that by default the old material had some channels activated and some images preloaded.How can you recognise the different kind of layers?The images composing the channels are very similar to each other but there are some simple rules.
The color channel is normally a picture of the material. The bump channel is always a black and white version of it (Bump “reacts” just to grayscale values). Bump gives you the illusion of relieve, without actually changing the geometry of the surface. And reflection channel also works with grayscale values.
In the case of reflection, black means “no reflective” and white “reflective”. Normal channel (which is a advance version of the bump channel) is generally blueish.
It is a known problem (I think discussed somewhere else) were the texture coordinates do not align between one wall face and the adjoining walls end. This is due to the new Priority based connections, where walls no longer mitre. Also each wall has its own coordinate base - ie to the individual element, so when you move or drag a wall the textures keep aligned with the element.One way to try and solve this is by aligning the texture of the wall face to try and match the wall end - may work vice versa. If this is just one elevation, you could modify the wall junction order so that the slightly shorter wall then extends pasts the other wall - so you don't see the exposed end in that elevation (but then you'd have the same issue on the other elevation).We have been actively working on a solution - though it has proved to be more complex than one might have thought.Hope that helps.