Material Applied to Panel System

[TomD_Arch]

I am modeling a modular exterior wall panel system with perforations. I am using a repeating circle pattern .jpg in the Special Purposes Map>Cutout of the Arch & Design mr materials on individual panels. No problem. Once assembled, the panels, in real life, would have a large image, or advertisement, across the entire surface. Problem.

 

I am trying to model this for two efficiencies:

1. I can change the cut-out pattern .jpg and update the wall system perforation instantly.

&

2. I can point to a new image and the large art piece or advertisement will change

 

I feel like I should be able to apply the pattern-cutout to one module and then once arrayed selecting and group and then apply the art image as another image.

 

Am I insane? Don't answer that.

 

Clearly my skill level and knowledge of this is lacking any ideas or solutions would be helpful. Thank you!

[John Dollus]

use two different mapping channels to accomplish this. for example, keep your cutout on map channel 1 corresponding to the smaller uvw map channel you already have in the modifier stack, add the overall art piece texture map to the diffuse slot using map channel 2 and create a new uvw modifer set to channel2 and sized to fit the artwork.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Can use convert to bitmap in PShop with a custom pattern to just make a full panel map.

 

In Max:

Need two bitmaps. Grayscale.

 

Big - make this the same pixel count as your panel count.

Small - this is the shape you want in all possible sizes. Circles and stars work OK. Letters not so OK. I used Illustrator's Blend function to make one test shape and a loft with a gradient ramp in max to make another. It's probably good to set blur to zero(ish and sampling to none.

 

To your facade add two UVW Maps per previous post. One is the whole size of the facade. The other is the size of one panel. Give them different Map Channels. Align the two maps up by a corner so the pixels and panels are all cool.

 

Load the two gray bitmaps into the material editor. Give them Map Channels to correspond to the UVW Maps.

 

Create a Composite Map. Load the big and small bitmaps into it. Bottom one Normal. Top one either Overlay or Multiply. I've been having better results with Overlay for the way I'm making my maps.

 

Create an Output Map. Load the Composite Map into that. Create two new nodes in the graph. One at 0.49,0 and one at 0.51,1. This gives you a black or white output with a small bit of blurring at the transition. Adjust to taste.

 

Use this Output Map as your cutout.

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The two samples here, one is a plain star. The other is a fancy attempt to see if I can morph between a P and a G. It "works" but the idea of morphing between those two shapes isn't the best and the limitation of trying to store all intermediate sizes in a single bitmap is limiting.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Wait wait wait...

OK, this isn't what the OP was asking for. It doesn't use cutout at the reshape time takes a couple minutes. But it does give geometry (so it's slower). But you can slap a shell on it for some thickness.

 

Used repeated elements in a poly. Mesh select with a texture. And a morph target.

 

Some of my shapes are funny. Probably because I didn't take the time this time to make sure the pixel count on the controlling image and the panel count were the same and well aligned.