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]

Like I said, I'm happy to take a look at the model or a simplified model which illustrates some problem with nesting blocks or light sources. So far I really don't have much to go on-- and no known issues.

[Brian Kraut]

I included a simplified model in one of my previous posts called render blocks test.dwg.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Thanks-- I missed it. I also, of course, missed the fact that I'm talking to two different users at once-- likely with different problems. Another cup of coffee may be required.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I'll need the decal file as well-- or at least its name-- before I can test.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Never mind-- I found the name internally and was able to reproduce.

Brian-- I'm pretty sure this is a precision problem. For the smaller monitors, the screen is a box with a thickness of 0.005 inches and sits right on another surface. This about 1/10 of a millimeter which may be too small a distance to resolve on your particular model, where the dimensions are on the order of 100 ft or more. This would explain the intermittent nature of the problem, as well as the fact that instancing the screen inside of a block might easily make the precision problem even worse.

I'd recommend drawing the screen as a 3dface rather than a solid-- this will make it easier to apply the decal correctly. I would definitely give it more separation from the underlying solid. The larger monitors use 0.05 inches-- about 1 mm-- which seems to work better.

[Brian Kraut]

Hmmm, wont let me reply to your most current reply.

Could be a precision problem, but seems like it is more of an issue for me and the others with inserting multiple instances of the same block. By just deleting the group of monitors on the left the ones on the right start working correctly again. Before I deleted the rest of the model and the other two rooms that had the same monitors the big monitor had the same problem.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

nXt instances the blocks after you insert a certain number of copies-- something like 4 or 5-- can't quite remember. Instancing means that I keep only one copy of the geometry just like AutoCAD. This can make precision problems worse. By deleting stuff you may have cut the number of blocks below the instancing threshhold. Precision problems also tend to be very intermittent-- changing the viewpoint or altering the scene geometry can make a big difference.

I did just verify that decals are working generally for instanced blocks. The drawing below has a bunch of blocks-- enough to trigger instancing. Changed the orientation of one of them.

[Ron Eddy]

it seems some of my nested blocks were mirrored. changing the X-value to 1.0 instead of -1.0 and rotating as needed took care of it.

thanks

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

As far as I (currently) know, mirroring should only be a problem WRT some special cases. Decals, of course-- I have my suspicions that displacements will get screwed up as well-- there may be more. There may be something I can do about it-- it's on the list to revisit.