Material Direction on Gable Fascia

[robdyck]

Is there any way to automatically get a timber texture to run parallel to a gable end fascia? Same for stair stringers. Its seriously lame that to get the texture direction right, you need to get out your saw and hammer and nails, and starting putting individual pieces on.

[Chopsaw]

Rob,  

 

Glad that you also want to design and build houses that are not vinyl boxes.  You are absolutely correct and unfortunately chief has been aware of this problem for some time now.

 

The totally ironic part is that the material direction for the sub fascia is correct and usually hidden by the fascia.  What I have done before is removed the fascia and made a copy of the sub fascia and moved it out and resized it accordingly.  It would be workable but not convenient if the materials for eave and gable fascia were separate but they are not.

 

Maybe drop a note to CA about your frustration as I just don't seem to understand why they don't fix the things that they know are broken.

[Kbird1]

Shadowboards also get it right ...I assume because they are really Moldings , otherwise you need to use a texture rotated to Roof Pitch deg. subtracted from 90deg.  ( eg.90-26deg. roof pitch = 64 degree rotation) but this doesn't always help as at the other end of the roofplane is usually different/opposite.

 

See post two down ... I was working with a texture already rotated to 90°

[robdyck]

19 hours ago, Kbird1 said:

Shadowboards also get it right ...I assume because they are really Moldings , otherwise you need to use a texture rotated to Roof Pitch deg. subtracted from 90deg.  ( eg.90-26deg. roof pitch = 64 degree rotation) but this doesn't always help as at the other end of the roofplane is usually different/opposite.

I've never had shadow boards auto-adjust the direction of the fascia material. What I did in this case and have done in the past is to use a separate roof plane just for the fascia on the gable ends. Drives me nuts, but in this case, it's just modelling, no roof plan is being provided.

I'll dive a bit deeper here because this is crazy annoying.

I'm using a timber framed roof that will have a 1x16 fascia and a 1x4 shadow-board. So I create a separate roof plane (2" wide) just to be able to show the correct grain direction.

Oddly enough, the fascia can be change separately but the shadow board on one side of the gable will auto-change the corresponding shadow board on the other side of the gable.

In order to change the shadow board material separately, I need to re-name one of the 1x4's so they are 'different'. However, then the shadowboards don't connect.

Luckily this doesn't really show from the distance of a full overview. Still, a lot of extra steps for this.

[Kbird1]

50 minutes ago, robdyck said:

I've never had shadow boards auto-adjust the direction of the fascia material.

 

You are right , what I didn't notice was that my "Dark Cedar" Material in the Plan I was in yesterday was actually a texture that was already rotated 90° (Vertical grain) when I made it.

 

Here I just tried it with a Walnut texture and rotating it to 90° got it to follow the Shadowboard too.

  

Rotating the Fascia texture work but you need a left and right rotation ( + and -) and it will only look right on one end. I also know now I don't need the back angle like i said yesterday that was also because my grain was 90° to start with.

 

[robdyck]

I'm still not over this grain direction thing. Here's an image from a plan that @LevisL posted quite awhile back. Notice that in this plan the grain goes the right direction for all framing members. I think this has to do with the origin of plan templates, but what do I know? In the image below, I replaced the texture file from the default framing material to my own, just to see what happens.

 

In this image from my default template, this is what I get for grain direction. I I really want to figure out how to correct this. The materials in both images have the exact same properties except for the texture file.

[robdyck]

Here's an image from Chief's 'Residential Template'. The grain direction is correct, even if I paint the framing with my own framing materials.

So the question is, how do I get those settings into my template?

 

[SNestor]

I'm not working at the software at the moment...so, take what I say with a grain of salt.  

 

But - can't you just create new materials for each of our fascia?  Open the material...copy it, change the grain direction...save it as something and then use it as needed.  Yea...this method is a PIA.  I get it...but, just something you could do.

 

Ok..I agree...Chief should just fix this issue.

[robdyck]

17 minutes ago, SNestor said:

I'm not working at the software at the moment...so, take what I say with a grain of salt.  

 

But - can't you just create new materials for each of our fascia?  Open the material...copy it, change the grain direction...save it as something and then use it as needed.  Yea...this method is a PIA.  I get it...but, just something you could do.

 

Ok..I agree...Chief should just fix this issue.

So I'm checking with tech support about this, and I'll post the results. But I think I'll be able to 'fix' this by taking one of Chief's templates, and importing all my settings. Essentially building a new plan template.

At first, I thought I may be able to import some setting from one of Chief's templates to my own, but this isn't a setting issue...there's something deeper and I think it's because my template has evolved over so many years from older Chief versions.

 

I double checked this by copying an entire model from a 'Chief' plan (where the grain auto shows correctly) and copying it to my default plan. In my default plan the grain all runs based on the material angle setting, even though it's the exact same material!

 

I don't mind making materials where I have to to get the right angle, but if you compare the different pictures closely, you'll see that in a 'Chief' plan, the grain is correct at studs, plates, headers, and truss members, whereas in my plan, they all run either vertical or horizontal, again, depending on the material setting.

 

I'm working on another timber plan now, and it's really handy to be able to draw a rafter and use as a rafter or symbol instead of constantly making solids.

Plus the framing looks so much better when it's right!

[Alaskan_Son]

3D View Defaults>Legacy Compatible Texture Mapping...Yuck

[robdyck]

8 hours ago, Alaskan_Son said:

3D View Defaults>Legacy Compatible Texture Mapping...Yuck

Awesome! How did you figure that out?

[Alaskan_Son]

3 hours ago, robdyck said:

Awesome! How did you figure that out?

 

I just ran through the possible settings that could be affecting materials outside of the actual material settings...Camera settings...nope, Render preferences...nope, 3D View Defaults...ding ding ding ding ding!!!!