Strata Design 3D CX 6: the designers’ key to unlock 3D

Texturing

Apart from placing lights to actually make objects visible you will need textures to simulate the way objects look and feel. You can simulate of something is made of glass, gold or brick by using textures. The sophistication of a material is dependent on how accurately you can control visual aspects of a surface. That means independent control of reflections, bumpiness, glow properties, specularity and so on.

Textures are either created from scratch or you can select a preset texture from the resource palette. This is a library window at the bottom of the Strata workspace (initially) that holds presets of texture, models, effects, gels and backgrounds. You can simply drag and drop them into your scene.

Image based textures

Strata Design has a lot of options to control the visual characteristics of a material through 14 different channels. Twelve of these channels can be controlled via image maps. I will only sum up the available channels here but not go into their specific function within a material. You have:

• Diffuse Color (controlled via image map)
• Diffuse Amount (controlled via image map)
• Ambient Amount (controlled via image map)
• Glow Factor (controlled via image map)
• Opacity (controlled via image map)
• Index of refraction (controlled via slider or preset value)
• Specular Color (controlled via image map)
• Reflectivity (controlled via image map)
• Embedded Reflection (controlled via image map)
• Smoothness (controlled via slider or preset value)
• Bump (controlled via image map)
• Shadow Cast Map (controlled via image map)
• Stencil (controlled via image map)

Each of these individual channels can be switched on or off.

You can also use a linked and layered Photoshop file that basically can control all of the channels as layers directly from within Photoshop. This is a great workflow to allow the best possible editing of your image based maps in Photoshop, while using Strata for rendering the models and surfaces with the best possible rendering options (in which area Photoshop is just not up to par…)

Surface Textures

These textures are procedurally generated. They can be used as a layered texture in combination with other (image based) textures or 2D or 3D volumetric textures.

There are several types to choose from among which are: Corrosion, Mock Plank, Mock Tile and Ripple.

Solid Textures

The solid texture category is a bit more advanced. Textures in this category are basically a 3D material and as such they do not need a special type of mapping. The materials are through and through so when they are applied to a model they do not show any projected artifacts like distortion and smearing.

There are several categories again to choose from and you can use them as building blocks or starting point to create your own special materials. Textures in this category are: Brick, Candy, Color, Concrete, Marble, Rock, Stone, Terrain, Wood, Reflection, Shadow catcher.

Volumetric Textures

The final category is the volumetric textures. These textures can simulate materials such as clouds, vapor, fog haze and mist. You can use these to add more depth to a scene or to attenuate colors over distance.

This story written by Albert Kiefer

Albert Kiefer is a professional designer and technical expert located in the Netherlands. He has well over 20 years of experience in the fields of computer illustration, animation and image manipulation. He also develops interactive concepts and graphical interfaces for large international corporations that are active in consumer electronics.