Material editor scale indicator

[chris castelein]

Im throwing my 2 cents in on this... in the material editor preview window i have no idea what size of sphere, slab, or square it is...

After a few searches i saw posts touch on this.

it gives me a "scale" setting.. without know whether it is in inches, feet, meters, millimeters, miles, or kilometers it does nobody any good to have it. it is complete guess work..

it would be nice to display the current units (with the option to flip between metric or english units) and be able to set the size of sphere, slab, or square to any desired size.

 

right now its render and see if it looks good... this can take hours to get a handfull of materials to "scale" right.

 

alot of materials (like brick) i manual set scale from how it fits on a face of a cube. three courses to 8" side of the cube...

 

ok, thats my rant...

sorry.

ccastelein

[Wayne Williamson]

Under the options tab above you can set the units to inches or millimeters when you are creating a new material. If you are adapting an existing material this setting should be set already, and you can check it here.

[chris castelein]

so a scale of 12 means i have a 12" diameter sphere or 12" radius sphere... or 1'-0" square cube.. im just suggesting something that says what size the cube is...

[Jorge Javier Lara Domínguez]

Hello. The window (with the sphere, cube or slab) is actually only a help to have apreview of material to work. The important thing is to define the scale of the map to use as your base material. The attached example you can see the creation of a material based on a picture stone with 12 modules (which are 30x30 cm each) which gives mea dimension of 1.20x0.90 cm, in the window the preview to be 1:100 scale gives meimages of what would be my material in the final representation. I hope you servesomething this information.

[Jorge Javier Lara Domínguez]

[Ros. Riha]

Questions and ideas regarding this issue:

1. I still keep forgetting the aspect ratio between cube and sphere dimensions. I would love if I set the sphere dimension to 1unit to have it of 1unit diameter and once I switch to cube to have it of 1unit length
2. What are dimensions of the slab and how much of it do I see?
3. Would it be possible to see some kind of low wall around the corner of the slab to indicate the size of say 2x2meter area of it? Or to have some other means of showing it - like red outline or red vertical lines...
4. Please, what is the relationship between scale of the texture and units being used? Is it 1x1?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by (4)-- but dimensions are always in drawing units.  Jorge has it correct in his picture above.

It's hard to be precise with the slab, as you've noticed.  Use the cube instead.  The scale is the length of a side in drawing units.  The origin is located (unfortunately) at the center of the cube.  I should probably move this to a corner.

[chris castelein]

I was just commenting that with a glance i should be able to see a 16" cube and know that if i used a brick jpeg map that i would have 6 courses of brick. A quick glance thing. Also too know that its in the preferred units of the user for that material (ie for me in inches or feet) in case im using a large map that needs to be seen at or on a larger object (ie parking lot asphalt etc.)

im just saying it would be nice to have.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I suspect locating the origin at the near corner would help with this.  Drawing units only though-- inches for most US users.

[Ros. Riha]

Good to have you back, Roy - how was the holiday?

• (4) is answered by saying Joe has it right - thanks.
• Slab is useful to get the feeling how a flooring would work - and the size is only one of problems there: it is quite difficult to tune up a material using the predefined lighting setup in ME. It would be very helpful to have the switch to enable the same lighting as used in AutoCAD to be used in ME too (or to be able to load a saved lighting setup)...remember that discussion started by Marc, that ended up by adding a switch to enable to control how much the environment would influence a material?)
• Moving the origin to the lower left cnr is definitely very good idea