Hi,

I'm making a model of an old fashioned microphone. The body of this microphone is capsule-shaped and covered evenly with little metal holes, so I knew texturing it would be interesting. I tried to be clever with decals but that wasn't cutting it.

There's a Material in the DarkSim collection called Metal Holes which is exactly what I need, but the metal holes are stretching around the edges. I'm green when it comes to using Darksims -- but I had thought they're supposed to cover an object evenly? The only tweak I did was to evenly scale the Material down to 10% on x, y, and z because the holes were initially too large.

Any help on this is appreciated, thanks!

-Jim

I think this is one of those instances where you will be better off applying this to a flat surface and creating a decal with it.

Then I would recommend you flatten just the top section (where it's curved like half a sphere) and apply the decal to that, then cylindrical decal map the other section.

That's probably how I would tackle it.

Hi Jody,

Thanks for the reply. Actually using both a cylindrical decal for the side and a planar to the top is exactly what I tried first! It was 90% looking good but there was a clearly visible seam where the two met, mostly because these little metal holes are so uniformly spaced everywhere else, your eye catches it where they're not.

I have alot to learn about procedural materials though, as a noob, I thought they would solve this perfectly.

I'll keep plugging at it and if I get anywhere, I'll post the results here.

thanks,

-Jim

I'm not sure why it's like that either. But I think Bitmap Plus is the plugin for you. Do a search of the forum. It allows you to place an image on any object evenly without messing with uv coordinates. You can even use normal maps.

hey Ken,

BitMapPlus did a pretty good job, not quite perfect, but not bad. I'll have to figure out which one I want to go with, but here's the compare of Darksim and BitMapPlus.

-Jim

The darksim one looks great. Shame. There must be some way round it. I wonder could you devide the shape into two groups and put the material in both groups. Then rotate the material so it's pointing the right way.

does the capsule need to be one piece? If you modeled a similar shape, but looked like it was meant to be in halves or quarters, then you could hide the seams.

I really like the appearance of "holes" that the Darksim texture creates

Hey guys,

I'll have to play with separating the capsule into pieces and see where that gets me. Here's the latest. For now I've gone back to the old adage, if you can't fix it, hide it.

I don't mind the new metal bands, but even so, an acute eye will still see where the holes begin their stretching.
From a distance it's now workable. Real close-ups might be hard to pull off.

Rob, I agree, the Darksim metal holes are really too good to pass up, I just have to keep tweaking it until I can make it work.

-Jim

[attachmentid=20570]Modeling it flat and using a pose to make it round again will give holes that are uniform almost all the way across.

[attachmentid=20572]

Not a perfect solution. I bet if one had the actual DarkTree material authoring program one could tweak that material so that it projected it's holes radially instead of flat..

Rob,

Hmmm... you did that extra step, thanks for trying that, but egads! it's still showing some stretching.

I think you're absolutely right, and your test shows, the procedural somehow must not be set up to apply those holes in a radial fashion. I wonder if the other metal Darksims, like diamond plate, have the same behavior. I hope not, but I'll test a few more out and report back here.

For my purposes, I'm using this for TAOAM exercise 8, I think it's probably good enough with the metal bands to use -- I'll just adjust the camera angle so not to accentuate it.

-Jim

Jim,
I like the look of the bands around the mike.

How important is it to get it right, meaning, is it the focal point of the animation?

If so you could create a simple geometry to make the hole then use the geometry as a boolean (one of my new favorites, next to blowing things up of course).

You could shape the booleans to give you the correct chamfer on the holes you want.
It would add to the patch count but wouldn't be too bad.

Like here http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...amp;hl=Booleans
David

Hey David,

Well in this case it's not a background prop, instead there will be a character in close-up speaking into it. But with the metal bands I think it will work!

I'll have to look into booleans at some point, I've avoided them until now. But I'm not too keen on trying them for this. It seems like too much work for the end result, I'm guessing there would be over a hundred of those little boolean holes -- all that fine positioning -- by the end it would give me a nervous hand twitch! And I'd probably end up doing a bad job lining them up too.

I did a render of a few more Darksims here and it looks like it's a common behavior. I'm still a bit surprised by this, it seems like what you would get if you did a planar decal on the front. Too bad they don't have a Radial On/Off toggle or something.

-Jim

With a little practice, it can be quick to create and position lots of identical objects. There's a duplicator wizard or, if you're a luddite like me, you can copy and paste. Take your first boolean 'hole', copy and paste, adjust the pivot point, rotate and offset as required. Now select the original and the copy together, lather, rinse, repeat - once you have one layer of holes you can copy & paste the entire row as many times as you like.

Booleans? that's going to add at least 5 patches for every hole. and there are hundreds of holes there...



Well, that's where you put the band. The area outside of the band would have uniform holes instead of progressively stretching holes.


But how big is the mic going to be in the final render? If it's quite small the holes might just end up as noise.

Why dont you use a Cookie-Cut-Map or Transparency-map?

*Fuchur*

Hi Gerald,

Well, using Cookie Cutter or Transparency decal offer new ways of making holes, but it's still the same problem because it's still a decal, how to map this capsule shape so the sides and top are evenly covered with holes without any seams?

Rob,

Yes, I see your point. Your method has further reduced the problem so combining that with the metal bands might do it. I still have to combine that cylinder piece with the top of the capsule though -- so there's still a possibility of a visible boundry between the two -- but I'll give it a shot.

BTW, this old microphone will be front and center with a character talking into it, so that's why I'm sweating the details -- but honestly, it's almost good enough now that with the right camera angle it would work fine.

I rigged it so the stand can extend and the top can rotate with Pose sliders. I'm going to try and tackle the audio cord next.

-Jim

If you make a repeating texture, you can projection map it rather than decal it. "Cylindrical" would be the choice, although the dome on top is still going to be a problem no matter what you do.

you'd have to make one map for the cylindrical portion and another to "spherical" project on the dome. Tough to make them match at the seam.

if you own darktree you have to go into the shader itself and change the mapping and then it will give you the results you want. Chances are is is set to plan mapping. it is well worth the investment to buy darktree. just my 2 cents.

Chad,

Thanks for this info! I was thinking it was probably something easily changable from the program but it's good the hear that's true. The current price is a tad too high for me -- for this one use, and this microphone project is just going to be for fun anyway. Down the road for other projects I can see how useful the creation program would be.

But that makes me think about their new product Tactile Ink, do you know anything about that? It looks like a paint program that lets you "paint" to create procedural materials. If so, that sounds incredible. I think I'd rather go that route.

-Jim

I have read some stuff about it but not sure how it is going to be used and where but it will be nice to keep on eye on it.

WOW, the Tactile Ink thing looks amazing!

High painting skill required none-the-less I suspect.

I dont think so, you could probably be less than average with photoshop or like programs and do fine. Should be similar to Paint for AM just does prodecural instead. Plus I dont think it will be availible in AM, maybe a standalone like photoshop but I am not sure yet.