Best approach to create this flooring
Hey all.
I'm struggling to figure out a decent approach to laying out the flooring slabs on the landscaping of a job I'm currently doing.
It's an Arch-Viz job so realtime optimisation isn't necessary.
I've enclosed the drawing in question, and highlighted the kind of areas which are proving tricky.
The blue area in particular.
Now, the problem is that the tile layout curves on two axis, as well as having a slight curve as you can see from the plan view, it is also sloping upwards. The levels rise and fall along the pathway.
In the red area, the tiles are just laid out and cut at the edges to fit the area, which shouldn't prove too difficult to place, but then to slope them is what I'm having issues with.
The biggest problem is the blue area. Those tiles are laid to fit the curve (in reality, they'll all be recangular tiles with the curve being formed from varying the joint widths), so the only option I can see is to place them by hand... which I obviously don't really want to do.
Also being curved means just using a texture may not work too well. The only way I could see doing it with a texture is to make the curved shape using a plane, then snap the UV's horizontally so the tile texture curves with the geometry, but there'll be some nasty stretching.
If anyone's got any suggestions that'd be awesome.
Thanks
EDIT: With the drawing at that size, the slabs look a LOT straighter than they do when working to scale, what looks like a minute curve from that size becomes a bit of a pain in the ass zoomed in.
I'm struggling to figure out a decent approach to laying out the flooring slabs on the landscaping of a job I'm currently doing.
It's an Arch-Viz job so realtime optimisation isn't necessary.
I've enclosed the drawing in question, and highlighted the kind of areas which are proving tricky.
The blue area in particular.
Now, the problem is that the tile layout curves on two axis, as well as having a slight curve as you can see from the plan view, it is also sloping upwards. The levels rise and fall along the pathway.
In the red area, the tiles are just laid out and cut at the edges to fit the area, which shouldn't prove too difficult to place, but then to slope them is what I'm having issues with.
The biggest problem is the blue area. Those tiles are laid to fit the curve (in reality, they'll all be recangular tiles with the curve being formed from varying the joint widths), so the only option I can see is to place them by hand... which I obviously don't really want to do.
Also being curved means just using a texture may not work too well. The only way I could see doing it with a texture is to make the curved shape using a plane, then snap the UV's horizontally so the tile texture curves with the geometry, but there'll be some nasty stretching.
If anyone's got any suggestions that'd be awesome.
Thanks
EDIT: With the drawing at that size, the slabs look a LOT straighter than they do when working to scale, what looks like a minute curve from that size becomes a bit of a pain in the ass zoomed in.
Replies
The FloorGen script makes quick work of floor tiles/slabs, but unfrotunately it doesn't work on curves shapes, either horizontally or vertically. I can use the bend modifier, which works really well but doesn't give much accuracy (in the sense that I need to make the shape straight first then bend it to be correct, so it's a bit of guesswork with the straight shape).
Also, the spacing tool might work with a spline shaped to the slope / curve of the pathway but it doesn't give the best results from the quick tests I did.
Red is spacing tool, purple/grey are FloorGen.
If anyone's got better suggestions that would be great too!
draw a spline along 1 of the courses of tiles to get the curve of the paving.
make sure that you keep the start and end vert as corners and the middle vert as smooth.. that or a very even bezier.
path deform the tiles to the spline. (use the world space modifier)
switch the axis to X (presuming everything was created in the top view)
click on move to path
change the percentage to 50 percent
if you want to collapse the stack you will need to right click on the path deform modifier and 'collapse to'.
give it a try. i can do a quick vid if you need it.
Sounds like it should work out perfectly, I'm not on my work comp now so I'll try it tomorrow.
I'm assuming once it's curved from the top view, I can collapse and run it through another WSM Path Deform for the vertical curvature?
Cheers