Rendering with MicroStation
Through illustrations and hands-on exercises, this book covers every aspect of rendering in detail, including cameras, materials, lighting, environment maps, and rendering settings.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Rendering with MicroStation
Chapter 7: Advanced Materials
You have worked with materials that incorporate pattern maps and bump maps, which are created from digital images. In this chapter, you will continue working with other definable materials, namely procedural textures and gradient maps. Finally, you will look at ArchVision's Rich Photorealistic Content (RPC).
Procedural Textures
In addition to being able to define materials using pattern maps from digital images, MicroStation's rendering engine also supports several procedural textures. These procedural textures have pros and cons. Here, you will learn both the advantages and the disadvantages of using these materials.
Several of the procedural textures that ship with MicroStation are 3D in that they have Size Z information in addition to Size X and Size Y. For these materials, the procedure calculates pixel information in the z-axis. For example, wood, marble, and stone work very well as procedural textures, particularly when applied to a solid. If you make a cut into a solid with any of these 3D procedural materials applied, the procedural material will look correct in the cut. The grain, veins, or joints will align correctly with the 3D procedural texture, whereas a 2D texture may fall short and require extra steps to make the joins align and look natural.
This could include requiring multiple definitions for the different faces of the solid to work around this shortcoming.
Procedural textures are wholly created by MicroStation Development Language (MDL) applications and are calculated by your computer. They tend to look less realistic than a texture made from an actual...
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