I used a .png for my fencing material base texture. It looks a bit funny in creator, but looks nice in SketchUp view. Is it supposed to look like that?
I also played around with a .jpg base texture and adjusted the opacity, which looks better in creator, but the opacity setting in creator doesn’t transfer to SketchUp view. Is there another way to make semi-transparent materials in creator?
.JPG files do not support transparency. This is where .PNG files do, and are the better option in this case.
The issue you are running into seems to be some finicky-ness with how the 3D viewer is rendering the border between parts of the applied texture that are somewhat opaque vs completely transparent. You’ll notice if you zoom into the texture, the 3D viewer is rendering an edge line to try and define a shape. But as there are parts of the texture that aren’t completely transparent, therefore the border is rendered in what looks to be “free space”.
The reason for this is that images often to “blend”/“blur”/“gradient” a certain amount depending on the resolution of the image to make it “look” better. Though the rendering for the 3D viewer is rather logical and has to choose a certain point that it considers to be a border.
As for other tips, let me know of anything in particular or I can otherwise have a brief look over the graph to give it a bit of a “critique”!
Thanks for the explanation. I’d be happy for any tips on the graph. I’m aware there are plenty of geometry inefficiencies. Is there a better way to apply a base texture to 3D geometry? I’m using project UV for each projection axis, and I’m not sure if I’m overcomplicating it.
Admittedly, material projection in Trimble Creator is rather rudimentary at the moment with only single plane projection, rather than say, box or spherical projections. The way you’ve currently got projections working at the moment is a good one. Though I’d make the same observation as with other parts of the graph as with this one: I tend to look for other parts of the graph that already have the same patterns to re-use in other parts of the graph (so that we’re essentially not re-making sections of the graph that do the same thing).
In the case of the UV projection, there is an input setting on the project UV node called repeat bounds which when set to all objects will project the UV over all input primitives, meaning if we pre-arrange those smaller fences that contain the gate, we can just use the same projection settings for both fence lengths. See here for an example: Trimble Creator
As for the other parts of the graph, I’d recommend using the extrude curve node to create the geometry that forms the fence rectangles, rather than creating them from scratch again. As they have their own UV projections, we’ll need to split the rectangle into individual segment lengths which we can do like so: Trimble Creator. Which from here we can extrude the curves and use the get primitive node to isolate the particular sides of the fence for projection.
Positioning the gate with this may prove a little more difficult, but if you have a look into the split curve node, we can split the curve of a chosen side before we extrude it to make a gap in the fence. Note that you’ll need to split the curve twice for each side and you’ll need to map the U coordinate of the curve to a particular length via a range node. See this pattern: Trimble Creator
Doing it this way negates the need for a whole bunch of switching and aligning of the fences at the end of the graph, even if it is a little more complex to get there!