How to create a realistic stucco texture.

I don’t know where your from, but here in Arizona, we use a lot of stucco. I mean a lot. So its only fitting that we come up with a good stucco texture. I see a lot of renderings out there where the stucco looks dull and lifeless. In the real world, new stucco is pretty monotone in color without a lot of variation but without variation it tends to look flat. Here is the key to making good stucco.

I use a Standard v-ray in  material in 3dsmax. In the diffuse color slot, I use a hue  for the general stucco color.  You need to play around with this a little  to get the exact stucco color you want, lighting will be a factor. Under diffuse map slot, I do a concrete texture that isn’t too varying in lightness and darkness and not a heavy texture. (see above) I set that to 15 percent. This slot is where I control the weathered look of the concrete. The higher number, the more weathered it will look. You also would need to adjust the color to make up for the gray in the concrete if you are increasing the diffuse value. In the bump map slot, I do a noise map at 36. In the noise map, I do a .6 size and noise type- regular.

The size of the noise is good when you set your UVW map on your object to about 150″x150″ x150″.  Your rendering also has to be fairly high resolution or you won’t see the sandy finish bump effect. If  you are doing a low or medium resolution, or you building is far away in the scene, you may need to increase the noise size to .8.

Also, if you do increase your value in the diffuse map slot, you can always add a color correction directly to the concrete map for further color adjustment.

That is pretty much it. A very simple stucco. Please feel free to experiment with this concrete map! Good luck and happy rendering!

The dying art of Autocad Modeling… Is it.. old school??

I admit, I model in Autocad.. Is this lame. Sometimes people give me that look. The look that “your only modeling in Autocad because you can’t model in 3dsmax.”

That’s not true, I chose to model in Autocad. I come from a generation that autocad was the be all, end all. 3dmax was just this program that was really cool but no one in the office would actually own a copy.   It seems like all the younger renderers wouldn’t touch Autocad with a ten foot pole for modeling. So my question is, is autocad modeling old school?

I think Autocad is a great tool, and now with the advances in lighting and materials, and new presspull command, I think it intergrates with clients elevations and floorplans pretty well.  I was recently on a forum called cadtutor.com and impressed to see some of the new renderings in autocad, lighting and all. Autocad has come a long way from Release 10. It no longer looks like a cartoon.  Some of the interior shots were pretty amazing.

So I dont know nurbs. But you gotta love presspull. Take a client elevation and just start presspulling the regions until you have a whole side of a building modeled in no time. I admit, it still needs a little work and is a little buggy but it could be great.

I can model fast. Probably faster than any 20 year old cg artist with a 3d program. So cut us old timers some slack and don’t give us that look like we are a dying breed. Autocad still rocks!

Trick or Treat..Texturefly.com goes live…12:00 a.m. Halloween!!

Car Image Clipart - Texturefly.com

Ghost Hunters isn’t the only thing going live this Halloween. Texturefly.com will launch at 12:00 A.M. this Halloween, October 31, 2008.  We have been working diligently to get our texture store up and running. And the great thing is, although we have a limited number of tree images, people images, car masked images, plant clip art, etc, we add new stuff to our site everyday.

All images will be sold individually. Everyone knows how hard it is nowadays to find good images for our 3d renderings and architectural illustration. There are a limited number of sites  selling stuff and  I’ve been to them all through the years looking and buying textures  (imagecels and got3d) . Our goal is to be the premier online texture store. We want you to know that quality and variety are number one.

Most of our clip art photoshop masked images are 12.7 mega-pixel high resolution tiff files. We don’t supply an alpha channel but instead each image is cut out on a separate layer and so all you need to do is drag and drop. All plants supplied are 6.3 mega-pixel. We used a professional Canon 5D camera to shoot all our trees, people, cars, plants etc.

Categories that include images now are Domestic car images, Foreign Car images, Desert Tree images, Broad leaf Tree images, Flowering Tree images, SUV/Truck images, Desert Plant images, Beach/Gym People images, Casual People images, Active Adult/Senior images.

We will be traveling though out the US to provide all zones of Plants and Trees, so if you don’t see your particular types of trees, don’t be discouraged, we will be adding new images daily.  Some categories coming soon are, Business people images, Conifer Trees, Cactus, Aerial view, Blooming Plants, Evergreens and also Sky images, Panoramas and Tileable textures such as stone, brick and other great seamless texture maps for 3dsmax.

We will also have a newsletter listing all our new products and specials so be sure to create an account with us so you can find out the latest and greatest at texturefly.com. And remember, if there is anything that you would like to request, please email us at info@texturefly.com  Happy Halloween from Texturefly!