blocks and decals

[Brian Kraut]

I have a few blocks with decals attached that are not rendering with the decals.  I added the decal to the part, made it into the block, and the rendered block does not show the decal.  If I explode the block before rendering the decal does show up.  Any idea what is up with that?  I always had decals in my blocks in AR3 and never had to explode them that I can remember. 

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Hmmm--- I just tried the following.

1. Opened a new drawing and created a box.
2. Placed a planar decal on one side of the box
3. Used the _BLOCK command to make a block out of the box

The decal rendered ok.

I then manipulated the block by 3drotating, moving and scaling it. Still OK.

If we can't figure this one out I may need to take a look at your model.

[Brian Kraut]

I deleted a bunch of the model so it is a reasonable size now with just the problem blocks. If you render the grouping of monitors on the right only the big one has the decal attached (that one was not working until I deleted the other two rooms). Delete the group of monitors on the left side and now all of the decals on the right work correctly.

[Brian Kraut]

Very bizarre. I did the same thing. I opened a new drawing ant put in a cube and attached a decal and blocked it. Works fine. Went back to drawing that had issues and still had same problem. Deleted everything in the drawing other than one of the problem blocks and purged so I would have a smaller drawing to send but now all of a suden it works.

Hmmm, old drawing was four concepts for an engine control room on one drawing. Each room had three different types of monitors with the same decal pasted on the screens. Tried deleting just some of the rooms and some monitors render with the decal intact and some don't. Delete all but one room and all monitors render fine.

[Alejandro Testa]

Once Peter saids. something like "Friday´s mode"... :-)

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I'll take a look at your model when I get a chance-- see if I have a clue what's up.

[Ron Eddy]

i have been having a similar problem, and it seems to be random. in the attached image, the nearest fixtures on the left and right are instances of the same block, the right one is just rotated 180 degrees. the decals on the right don't show, the ones on the left do. the same conditions are true of the next, taller fixtures - right one rotated 180 degrees. this time the decals show on both left and right. in AR4 i sometimes had trouble with decals that were too big a file, but this one's only 90K. i know i can, in this case, create a left side and right side version and have it work, but it would be nice not to have to.

[akinlolu olugboji]

Have tried checking, "double sided"?

[Ron Eddy]

Double sided seems to have resolved it - although I don't understand the double sided-ness of it.
Anyway, thank you very much!

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Hmmm.... Are they mirrored? It's possible the decals aren't surviving the negative scale factors. If you can, upload a simplified version of the drawing using the Support->Upload a File option above and I'll take a look.

Very nice rendering, BTW. I'd love to have a copy for the gallery if you're willing....

[Ron Eddy]

using double sided decals seems to have fixed it.
they're not mirrored, simply rotated 180 degrees. at first they were mirrored and i thought that might be the problem, so i re-inserted them rotated.

another question, possibly related: the right hand fixtures, inserted at a rotation of 180 degrees, are showing dark shadows on the "shelf supports". the left hand fixtures are not. when i explode the right hand fixtures, the shadows go away. is there something i can do when defining the block to avoid this, or do i have to have as many versions of the same block as there are orientations in the drawing? i'm guessing that if i re-create the fixture block rotated 180 degrees that will solve the problem. for what it's worth, the shelf supports are blocks themselves. is there something going on with nested blocks? i know stripping materials from objects seems to require weeding through every level of nesting - some of our blocks go 4 or 5 levels deep.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

AFAIK nested blocks are working fine-- and light fixtures can be oriented at will. It's possible mirroring is causing some problems, but rotation should be OK.

[Brian Kraut]

None of mine are mirrored.