Adding thickness to my material

Adding thickness to my material

by James Kirk

on Nov 23, 2011 at 5:42:35 pm

Hi,

I an relatively new to modelling, and am attempting to make a number of strange shaped tiles.

An image of one of these tiles can be found here.

What I want to do is give them a thickness, so that they appear as a 3d object. Because the edge of the tile is irregular, I can't give it thickness, as the material appears on the sides of the object.

The edges of the image (where it's black) is an alpha, as the image is a tif, this means that if I make a plane and apply the texture, it looks good, as the image alpha is used on the plane. If I apply it to a flattened cube, it applies the material to all sides of the cube. I suppose ideally I want to copy the edge pixels down through the thickness and apply the material to both the top and bottom.

I hope this isn't too simplistic, and my explanation makes sense. Thank you in advance for your help.

Cheers,

james

Re: Adding thickness to my material

by ronaldo montalvo

on Nov 23, 2011 at 6:15:58 pm

try putting your plane in a cloth nurb, you can add thickness in the controls. you might not need to add any subdivision, it can be set to 0 and the thickness setting will still work.

Re: Adding thickness to my material

by James Kirk

on Nov 23, 2011 at 6:21:24 pm

Thanks,

No luck, it still doesn't seem to connect the faces.

Re: Adding thickness to my material

by Brian Murphy

on Nov 23, 2011 at 8:32:53 pm

I would extrude a spline square that is subdivided several times, have the extrusion create a filet cap only on the top, just a bit. Then apply the texture to the top of your extruded tile to occupy the original plane and the extrusion (fit to object).

Next, I would add some light displacement noise in the material on the displacement channel, unless you just want to "Set point value" using a subtle crumple effect (convert to mesh first). Finally, apply Hypernurbs to the object for smoothing.