[Bf-committers] two new wood types and one new wood wave type

Ed Halley ed at halley.cc
Sat Dec 10 04:30:36 CET 2005


This provides two important new "wood" texture types, called tubes and 
cones.  Real trees are not like onions:  they do not grow concentric 
spherical rings as they grow older.  This provides two ring formats 
which may help make better woodgrains.

In the simpler sense, trees are more like cylinders than spheres.  I 
added a 'tubes' formula which offers this arrangement of rings.  The 
axis of the tube is the Y axis.  I chose the Y axis so that it would 
appear differently in the texture preview, since choosing the Z axis 
would make it appear exactly like the existing spherical rings.

In the even more accurate case, trees grow rings in a conic formation. 
The ring representing the winter of 1980 in a giant pine tree exists at 
half of the outer radius near the ground, but is very small when you 
climb halfway up.  The newest growth at the top does not have this ring 
at all.  Again, this format chooses the Y axis to represent the 
direction of growth.

There is no simple math which will produce knots, as those are the 
result of new branches rooting from the bole of the tree.  But even if 
you're not trying to model realistic woodgrain, these two new formats 
may offer some interesting new conic patterns for artists.

I also expanded the set of waveforms to include a "sharp at 1, smooth at 
0" rectified sine wave.  I call this a "cup wave."  This may be of 
interest in some situations, but honestly, I added it because it was simple.

This patch does NOT redesign the selection of geometries into a more 
appropriate pair of parameters, shape and noise.  There should not be a 
choice for "noisy rings" and "noisy cones" and so on, but instead a 
toggle button which represents noise and a simple list of shapes.  I 
still think this redesign should be done sometime, as the switch case 
for all these types is kind of annoying to maintain and add new cases.

Please, by all means, any comments or criticisms, let me know.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: new-wood-types.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 9735 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://projects.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/attachments/20051209/b4f6e8f4/new-wood-types.bin


More information about the Bf-committers mailing list