DECALS TO NURBS SURFACE

[Rich Rosemann]

I guess this has been answered countless times, but -- can a decal be attached to a Nurbs surface as shown in attached and follow the conture.  I have looked at Add Decal, Quick Mapping and Material Mapping, all with negative results.  Or because I'm just not using the choices correctly.  I chose the latter.

 

RichNURBS%20SURFACE.jpg

[George Ioannidis]

Rich, I think that exact decal mapping on such surface is the so called UV mapping (associated mapping using surface normals). It can be easily done using other software and pass it through textured OBJ file into it. Don't know if AutoCAD has such a possibility to do so though.

[Rich Rosemann]

Thanks George. I assumed NXT only allowed mapping to flat or cylinder surfaces. But I gave it a shot.
I don't think Acad does either. Unfortunately, I don't have access to software that does.
Thanks again.

[George Ioannidis]

I can try to do that for you Rich. Using free software I often use (Blender3D). Send me the model and bitmap if you will.

[Jan Verzelen]

maybe we should put UV mapping on our wish-list. Roy?

[Alejandro Testa]

It will be really nice to have UV mapping in Nxt

[Rich Rosemann]

Thanks for the offer, George.  At this point the model is in the concept stage with no final decision.  A nurbs shape similar to the model I displayed has been considered.  A number of lines of text attached to the surface and the model semi-transparent.  If the design continues, I may take you up on the offer and create a suggested shape and bit map of typical text to attach.  Thanks again.

Rich

George Ioannidis said:

I can try to do that for you Rich. Using free software I often use (Blender3D). Send me the model and bitmap if you will.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

It is available in nXt.  Flamingo (Rhino) and IRender (SketchUp) both make extensive use of it.  You can't create a UV mapped texture within AutoCAD and that's not likely to change-- it would be a lot of work to implement even something crude and really needs to be done by the modeler if it's going to work for things like solids.  Best bet is using something like Blender and exporting to obj.  I am willing to improve the obj reader.

[Jan Verzelen]

 you have my support on this one. 

[George Ioannidis]

That would be really nice of you Roy. Thanks in advance. I have really good success when importing obj files exported from Blender. It would be nice to have immediate translation of model's material and mapping informations like bump, normal or displacement mapping etc.

Roy Hirshkowitz said:

 I am willing to improve the obj reader.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Yep.  I'm working on that very thing for the nXt Studio (stand-alone) product.  I should be able to readily transfer the technology to the AutoCAD side.  I'm also very interested in examples of obj that crash or fail to read correctly.

[Rich Rosemann]

That would be great news, Roy.  At this time, I use a third party software to translate .OBJ files to .DXF.

Sometimes they translate well, other times, no so well.  Unfortunately, I tend to delete any that translaate poorly.  I noticed that many .OBJ objects created off-shore have a higher failure rate.  I'll save any other I find and e-mail them as you need.

 

Rich

 

Roy Hirshkowitz said:

Yep.  I'm working on that very thing for the nXt Studio (stand-alone) product.  I should be able to readily transfer the technology to the AutoCAD side.  I'm also very interested in examples of obj that crash or fail to read correctly.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

George-- can you send an example .mtl (companion file to the .obj) with some of the material props you describe?

George Ioannidis said:

That would be really nice of you Roy. Thanks in advance. I have really good success when importing obj files exported from Blender. It would be nice to have immediate translation of model's material and mapping informations like bump, normal or displacement mapping etc.