What is a Material?
Materials are digital images you apply to furniture, wall,
floor and other surfaces. For example, fabrics on furniture and wood finishes
on cabinets. Materials are also referred to as textures.
Plan3D accepts materials in a variety of popular formats:
JPG |
A compressed bitmap image file |
GIF |
A bitmap file limited to 256 colors |
BMP |
An uncompressed standard bitmap file |
PNG |
A compressed bitmap file that is becoming
popular |
See Import
Your Own Images for more information.
Putting Material on Surfaces
To apply materials to objects, drag them from the Directory
and drop them on a wall, furniture or other surface.
You are not limited to materials in the Directory. See
Import Your Own Images.
Apply To Multiple Surfaces
Apply a material to multiple surfaces of walls, floors,
countertops, roofs and stairs by holding in certain keys during the drag-and-drop
process. This also works with Edit> Copy
Color and Material .
Apply to
all sides: Hold down Alt key when dragging materials to walls,
floors, countertops, roofs or stairs to apply to all sides.
Apply to All Sides of All
Type: Hold down Ctrl and Alt keys when dragging materials to a
walls, floors, roofs or countertops to apply it to all sides of the same
object type. For example, hold in Ctrl and Alt keys and drag a material
to a wall to apply the material to all sides of all walls.
Copy and Paste Materials
See Edit> Copy Color
and Material for ways to copy materials on one surface so you can
paste it on other surfaces. See Apply to Multiple
Surfaces above for ways to apply to multiple surfaces.
Cover Part of a Surface
Apply material to part of a wall, floor, countertop or
roof with Build> Draw Materials.
For example, apply wallpaper to the top half of a wall, tile part of a
bathroom floor, etc.
Exception: This doesn't
work with furniture and other objects you drag in from the Directory.
It only works with floors, walls, countertops and roofs.
Editing Surface Materials
You can edit images on surfaces in several ways. To edit
a surface material, right-click it to get the menu of options below, and
choose one.
See descriptions to all of these below
In the example below a painting is dropped into a picture
frame and resized using "Scale Material." Descriptions for menu
items are below this image.
Move Material
Slide surface materials to position them:
Right-click surface and choose
Move Material - cursor will change.
Click-and-drag surface material
to move it.
Double-click or press Esc
to exit Move mode.
Limitations: Depending
on how surfaces were applied or tiled to furniture and other free-standing
3D models, the material's range of movement may be limited. This will
usually work with walls, floors, countertops and roof. We've found that
images which are not power of two cause the most problems.
Scale Material
Change the size of materials on objects several ways:
Scale Visually:
Right-click surface and choose
Scale Material - cursor will change.
Click-and-drag on the surface
to scale its material. Drag up to enlarge and down decreases.
Double-click or press Esc
to exit scale mode.
Scale
by Percent: Wall, floor, countertop and roof textures may be scaled
by right-clicking the surface and entering the percent value to scale.
For example, 200% will double the size and 50% will halve it.
Set Material Dimensions: Use the Tape
Measure or Dimension tools to see
the size, and the methods above to adjust it to match.
Rotate Material
Right-click surface and choose Rotate Material> and
a 45, 90 or 180 degree option.
Hide Material
To hide a material right-click surface and choose Hide
Material. Only the object's color will be shown if available. Choose again
to un-hide the material.
Hide Color
If color has been applied to a material using "Tint
Surfaces", you may use this option to hide it and see how the material
looks without the color. Choose it again to un-hide. See Paint
and Color for more information.
Properties
Right-click materials you've applied to objects with Build>
Draw Material, as well as walls, floors,
countertops and roofs - and choose Properties.
Note: You may only change reflectivity on walls, floors,
countertops and roofs.
Reflectivity:
This controls how much reflection a surface has. A mirror is 100%. A
setting of 0% will yield no reflection.
Scale
Percent: Scale surface materials by percent. A setting of 50% will
reduce the material size by half. A setting of 200% will double its size.
Image URL: Location
of image online or path to a file on your computer.
Note: The window above is the property window for partial materials
applied to walls, countertops, floors and roofs. Property windows for
whole sides of a wall, roof, countertop or floor have additional information
besides that shown above.
Use Your Own Images
You are free to use your own images as surface materials.
Image
Files |
Drag-and-drop JPG, GIF, BMP and PNG file icons from your
desktop or folders directly onto surfaces in plan3D.
To do this, shrink the plan3D window so you can see the
file icon on your desktop, then drag it onto the surface in your plan3D
project.
If the image file will not drag in, you may need to remove
illegal characters like &, * or % from
the file name:
Click the file
name under the file icon
When the letter
is selected, remove any lllegal characters or rename it completely.
Drag file icon
into plan3D
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|
Web Page Images |
Drag images from web pages directly onto surfaces in plan3D.
You may need to resize the plan3D and web page windows to do this.
If the web image will not drag in because it is linked
or has illegal characters like &, * or % in
the URL, do this:
Right-click
image and choose "Save Picture As..."
Save image to
your desktop
Drag file icon
from the desktop onto surfaces after removing any illegal characters.
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Also see Optimizing Image Quality below.
A
Note About Plan3D's Directory Materials are handled differently
then what you are doing above. They are thumbnails with an embedded link
pointing to a .p3d file which contains the information about the material
- such as how to scale it, who the manufacturer is, pricing, size and
other information. |
|
Adjusting Your Images
It is almost guaranteed your images will not
be the right size or in the right position when you drag them in. Fortunately,
Scale,
Move and Rotate allow you to
adjust them. See Editing
Surface Materials for an example.
Optimizing Image Quality
Here are some notes about improving the quality
of images you use in plan3D:
Materials are repeated like floor tiles when
applied to a surface. Seamless images look best if your surface is tiled.
If an image only repeats once, a painting in a picture frame for example,
then tiling isn't important.
Seamless images repeat without seeing the
seam between them. Square images with power of two pixel dimensions work
best.
*Powers of two
are 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512... Most plan3D materials are 256
x 256 or 512 x 512 pixels. However, images can be any power of two up
to 1024 x 1024. Avoid large materials as they take up excessive amounts
of memory. Plan3D uses openGL to render 3D images which works best with
power of two.
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Power
of two images, like the 64
x 64 pixel image on the right, will tile correctly when dropped onto surfaces
in plan3D.
Example of a power of two image dropped into plan3D:
Non-power
of two images, like the 72 x 72 image on the right, will be converted
to power of two - 128 x 128 in this case. (Images are not scaled.) The
extra space between 72 and 128 is filled with partial repeats of the image
so you don't get white banding - however, this only works well with some
images.
To make the image above tile correctly when dragged into
plan3D, open it in a paint program and scale it to be a 64 x 64 pixel
image or a 128 x 128 pixel image. Both of which are powers of two.
Example of a non-power of two image dropped into plan3D:
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