Grain Direction on Cabinet Door

[kwhitt]

I'm creating an X cabinet door.  The center stiles that form the "X" need to have the grain following the length of the member.  I have tried creating two new materials and rotating them, however, when I create the symbol, the texture direction reverts back to the usual position.  How do I go about doing this?  Thanks!

[DavidJPotter]

What you did is what I would do but it may be the symbol that is poorly made where you cannot assign a different material to each piece of the "X", sorry, try another symbol or make your own is my advice.

 

DJP

[rgardner]

4 minutes ago, DavidJPotter said:

What you did is what I would do but it may be the symbol that is poorly made where you cannot assign a different material to each piece of the "X", sorry, try another symbol or make your own is my advice.

 

DJP

I am pretty sure what David mentioned is probably the issue.  Is the x two or three pieces? If not when you paint the second color on it will change all directions.

 

helpful?

[Chopsaw]

Ouch...    The X can be 2 or 3 pcs. but the symbol needs to be constructed with independent materials for the opposing directions.

[kwhitt]

58 minutes ago, Chopsaw said:

Ouch...    The X can be 2 or 3 pcs. but the symbol needs to be constructed with independent materials for the opposing directions.

The door is a symbol that I had made previously.  I placed it in the plan as a fixture and added the three parts to form the X.  I then selected all four pieces to include the placed fixture and converted to a symbol.  I also assigned two unique materials to the X members - one rotated -34 degrees and the other +34 degrees.  When this new symbol was created, the wood texture reverts to its state before rotating.  Attached is the Symbol Specification DBX.  As you can see the materials are assigned correctly, but the preview image is all wrong.  Any ideas?

[Chopsaw]

Any chance you are looking at the back of the symbol or maybe the two materials are reversed ?

 

If the X shows on both sides of the door you may need to do both sides independently or even use exploded solids if you want the edge grain to be correct as well.

[kwhitt]

6 minutes ago, Chopsaw said:

Any chance you are looking at the back of the symbol or maybe the two materials are reversed ?

 

I don't think so.  The door shown on the left is before the conversion to symbol.  The one on the right is the symbol after creation.  I also checked the textures and they should be working.  Attached is the file.  Any ideas?  Thanks.

[kwhitt]

Here's the library file...

X door.calibz

[Chopsaw]

The symbol is a bit like brain surgery.  Could you put the original in a test plan ?

[kwhitt]

2 minutes ago, Chopsaw said:

The symbol is a bit like brain surgery.  Could you put the original in a test plan ?

I tried to upload the file and am told I have exceeded the limit of 25MB.  The zipped file is only 24.9MB.  I've gotten rid of everything except the two doors including CAD details, unused materials, etc. and I still can't lower it.  Is there a compression utility within CA that can minimize the file size?  Thanks Chop!

[Chopsaw]

Forget it.  I figured it out.  You outsmarted yourself. Because you oriented the grain in the symbol you can use the regular material for all the framing members.  Maybe we could both be brain surgeons.

 

[kwhitt]

I found some hidden objects.  The file is now attached.

test.zip

[kwhitt]

9 hours ago, Chopsaw said:

Forget it.  I figured it out.  You outsmarted yourself. Because you oriented the grain in the symbol you can use the regular material for all the framing members.  Maybe we could both be brain surgeons.

Thanks Chopsaw.  I started over from scratch and got it to work.  I appreciate the help!

[kwhitt]

9 hours ago, solver said:

Here is a truss that's been resized. Note how the grain remains correctly oriented. 

 

 

Thank you Eric.  I was able to get it to work.  Is there a method to get more grain variation on a cabinet instead of having the textures repeat for similar parts?  I would think the global setting would take care of this as I thought it worked in world texture space starting from 0,0.  What is the proper way to achieve this without manipulating each individual part?  Thanks again for the help!  Kevin

[kwhitt]

9 hours ago, solver said:

Here is a truss that's been resized. Note how the grain remains correctly oriented. 

 

Here's what I'm taking about with the textures.

[kwhitt]

7 minutes ago, solver said:

 

You are I think, at the mercy of the texture. You can copy the material then use the offset to move it, but it still looks similar.

 

I did make several versions of the texture with coordinate offsets.  It really is too much trouble and any similar door/drawer types are locked to use the same texture unless I add them individually in the Front/Sides/Back DBX.  This is one area I wish Chief would improve on.  It would be nice to have a fixed starting point (such as world 0,0) for the textures to project from.  This would make all mapping unique as long as the symbols don't occupy the same space.  Thanks again Eric.

[Ridge_Runner]

4 hours ago, solver said:

You are I think, at the mercy of the texture.

I think this is the real struggle. The repeat on most textures doesn't vary enough unless you go to the trouble of trying to make a much larger tiled texture, which has its own struggles. I like to use ACME's simple program for making brick textures with different mortar colors. I like to use a larger sample, which looks much better when applied. But the size of the texture can get quite large, especially if you then add different maps to it. I have one sample I often use that is 10MB - but it looks good!