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Materials - A level of indirection for textures
Hi
Apologies in advance if this is already possible and I just missed it.
My design involves sections of external wall finished in wood cladding interspersed with white render sections.
I would like to speculatively view different wood and render options.
As far as I understand it I need to alter each wall individually?
This is not as trivial as it sounds - I have 3 interconnected box like buildings, the plan suggests 12 walls but most of these are subdivided several times to reflect alternating external finishes ( wood or render ). I have not counted but I think I would be changing textures on at least 20 walls.
I wondered if it would be possible to have a level of indirection - that would mean that I assign material properties perhaps named by me as "wood panel" to some sections of wall and "rendered section" to others - I change two items of data but affect those changes over the whole building.
I would then edit only these materials ( 2 locations ) to change the wood cladding texture and rendered texture for the whole model.
It would be very nice to be able to flip between various scenarios when planning colour, wood type, texture type for external (internal) wall finishes - do I like this cladding or that cladding - you know lots of "uhmmm-ing" and "ahhh-ing" and switching things around countless times trying to decide.
Again apologies for writing this as a wishlist item if it is already available and I just have not found it yet.
New Zealand
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Re: Materials - A level of indirection for textures
I'm not absolutely sure this matches your requirements, but I wrote a plugin to allow me to make bulk changes to textures when I needed to evaluate quite a few options for a renovation.
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Re: Materials - A level of indirection for textures
If it is only the walls you wish to be able to modify and every thing else is complete, try export and importing the walls, then, when you wished to make changes it is simply a matter of opening the "modify" window Mike
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Re: Materials - A level of indirection for textures
Thanks digitaltrails I will take a look.
Hi Mike, thanks for the suggestion but I need to be able to change the walls physically as well as their appearance, we are using SweetHome as a design tool and in the last few weeks of near full time use (pretty much 8 hours a day) we have been through around five major design changes - in a sense we are using Sweethome as a "what if" tool exploring scenarios and making sure we do not let our selves down as we think this will be our first and last self build so there is a feeling we want to make the best of the opportunity.
We fully believe that an architect has skills to bring to the table and we will be using one but we also feel that we simply cannot afford the hundreds of hours we would like to spend in the architects office and that is why Sweethome is such a blessing - we can put in hundreds of hours and then ask an architect to bring it to a conclusion or to tell us we have got it horribly wrong and then we should go away and come back with #2.
I have to say I am very very impressed with SweetHome, I could offer lots of suggestions but that is in the spirit of wanting to make something that is excellent even better.
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Re: Materials - A level of indirection for textures
Thanks digitaltrails I will take a look.
...
We fully believe that an architect has skills to bring to the table and we will be using one but we also feel that we simply cannot afford the hundreds of hours we would like to spend in the architects office and that is why Sweethome is such a blessing - we can put in hundreds of hours and then ask an architect to bring it to a conclusion or to tell us we have got it horribly wrong and then we should go away and come back with #2.
...
It would be a pain to spend months on your own efforts to find that architecturally they are "horribly wrong".
One reason to consult with an architect earlier is that they are often good at guiding you on the big picture spacial and flow issues. Once these big issues are resolved or narrowed you could still flesh the design out on your own with SH3D and only return to your architect when further advice is desired.
Your SH3D models should hopefully increase the efficiency of the communications and help reduce the billable hours.
We used SH3d to plan a renovation, we spent way too many hours trying to analyse and design everything ourselves. The clarity we gained after our architects first visit was simply transformational.
France
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Re: Materials - A level of indirection for textures
This idea of indirection is nice but your goal could probably be achieved more easily by introducing the strorage of selections. A plugin could even manage some Store sélection... and Restore selection... menu items without the need of changing the program. Saving the stored selections in a SH3D file might be more difficult though.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
New Zealand
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Re: Materials - A level of indirection for textures
This idea of indirection is nice but your goal could probably be achieved more easily by introducing the strorage of selections. A plugin could even manage some Store sélection... and Restore selection... menu items without the need of changing the program. Saving the stored selections in a SH3D file might be more difficult though.
I could see this being implemented by walking the current selection items and adding them into a collection of weak-references. Restoring a selection would then just be a matter of setting the selection back to the weak-references that still refer to something.
I don't see a easy way to persist this into a separate non SH3D file.
A non-persistable weak-referenced based plugin would appear to be doable with very little coding. But I'm not sure it would be all that useful.
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Re: Materials - A level of indirection for textures
Hi Digital Trails,
Thanks for sharing your experience I will take that into account I think its good advice.
We feel "relatively" confident, I have a strong grasp of building, engineering, heat and so on, the build is a very simple modern approach - steel frame, insulated panels, zinc roof and single level - we are lucky our taste (Danish modern) coincides with the simpler type of build, all internal walls are stud non-load bearing which makes life easier but also offers future owners the option to change.
This will be our third tourist business and there are a lot of things to think about on those lines - a future buyer may like your house but does not like the way you have organised the tourist part or vice-versa - that part is a minefield but we have at least been there twice before.
We had an initial concern about the steel framework because of the spans involved across open plan living spaces but I simply visited local projects and could plainly see that we were in the right ball park even taking into account high snow loading requirements in the planned location which are higher than where we are now.
All the same I think you are right, we will book in for a consultation fairly soon - thanks.
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Re: Materials - A level of indirection for textures
Thanks for such a great tool !!
In all those hours of use SweetHome has not crashed on me once (Ubuntu) I use a lot of open source software but this really has stood out for me as a particularly good well written tool - it really is excellent and I can honestly say it will definitely have a major impact on our project.
I have seen enough these past few weeks to really begin to understand that if you have the kind of particular wishes and also plan to do some of the work yourself then sure as others have said and I have agreed you can go see an expert but.....
at the same time my wife and I are currently looking out the windows of one end of the main living room block trying to work out what is not quite working for us.
Is that we have yet to work on the external landscaping in the model.. is that what is not quite right yet? or is it something to do with the windows? Perhaps its just the way furniture is organised or perhaps its the shape of the building in that area - whats wrong is it cosmetic landscaping or interior design or have we still a lot of work to do in the design of the fundamental layout?
We have spent hours on this and I am sure we will spend many many more - I just do not feel we could afford this many hours with an architect so I have become a strong convert to the idea of the hybrid approach - use an architect but dont pay for every hour of creative "what if" time but you can do that yourself if you have great tools to depend on.
Even if the architect could/can do somethings 100 times faster than us it still would not help! We need time to absorb and digest each change and revision - sometimes you need to "sleep on it" and see how it looks in the morning so we would slow down the process even if the architect did not - working this way means it does not matter.
