textures

From: Zedand00@aol.com
Date: Sat Feb 17 1996 - 20:33:45 EET


Anyone interested in textures on STL objects,

Here's the short version.

There are three ways I've developed to create textures starting with the
finsest and working towards the coarsest.

1. In my cad program (and others) there is a distort mesh feature which will
pull and push the mesh according to sine and cosine formulas and heights and
widths which you can control.

Use: if you wanted to texture the handle of a tool, giving it a little
roughness or allowing it to be held a little easier, this would work and has
nice control. On the other hand you can't specify "sand paper texture" or
"knurled texture"

Time: rather quick unless you want to achieve a specific affect and then it
takes significant tweaking. STL problems are many many facets.

2. Relying on the lofting tool in a cad program, you can achieve some results
by designing the texture on a section by section basis. For example, if in
reverse engineering you want to replicate a fingerprint texture, you could
take 2d scans of sections of a cast of the finger, bring them into the
program as backdrops, trace them (with extreme care and tedium), Place them
at the proper interval between sections, and loft them together.

use: your imagination

time: as much as you want it to be. The more time the better the detail. STl
problems are large files, lots of facets.

3. Using one of a couple of programs which will turn black and white images
into terrain maps (KPT Bryce is not one such program but Cybermesh from John
Knoll(dollar ware), and Terrain Man (freeware) are), and save those maps as
DXF files which can be imported into your cad program if it accepts DXF
files. (There are some problems in the cad program which I won't go into here
which can make this tedious).
At this point, you can form, twist and deform these maps into a shape which
is close to your final objects. You can cut it into sections to be copied
and rejoined. Or you can use booleans to add or subtract that map to or from
your object.

Use: your imagination

time: as long as you want to spend and (with the added complication of some
tricky things in the cad program,) some difficulty. STl problems are large
files, lots of facets.



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