Hi Wooly, I am no expert in the 3D printing game, but I am going to stick my head on the block here and expect an axe swing at any time but here goes ...

Bump will not work as it does not alter geometry of the mesh, and is a render time effect where light intensity dictates height or depth of the "grain" or texture.

Displacement mapping does actually alter the geometry of the object , but again this is render time applied and does not display on the model being worked on.

Sculpture type modelling is available in Blender where you should be able to apply a texture to the brush and this will then translate to the model, however as a beginner i would say you would need lots of practice. Once you have that mastered then you would have to export to a format suitable for 3D printing.

The final option is to model the texture directly on to a surface within MoI. If its a grain or skin/fur effect then that is tedious and resource hungry with NURBS - If it's a simple tyre thread kind of texture then you can model it, but again it will be resource hungry.

HTH ...

Martin

Hi Martin,

Thanks very much for your advice, much appreciated. I'll go for the final option, I have nothing to lose (except my mind!)...it's worth a shot...how would I go about doing this in Moi?

Many thanks again
Wooly

"""""" I'll go for the final option"""""""""

Can you give some type of example of the model and texture you are talking about?

sorry, the model is a cube 8cm3. I have attached an image of the texture I'd like to wrap around it.

Hi Wooly, yeah like Martin mentions above a "displacement" map is more what you want for actually altering geometry rather than just a visual only effect like bump mapping.

Then different programs use some different kinds of terminology for generating the displacement as a stand alone model rather than just generating geometry at render time alone. Sometimes it's called "freezing" the model, and sometimes it may be a special tool - I think in Rhino it's called ExtractRenderMesh (or possibly "ApplyDisplacement"), although I'm not 100% certain - you should probably ask on the Rhino discussion list if you can't find it.


> how would I go about doing this in Moi?

MoI does not have any function in it currently for modifying an object by applying a bitmap texture onto it - typically that kind of texturing is done to polygon mesh objects and MoI specializes in NURBS surface editing and not polygon mesh editing.

MoI does have a command called "Flow" which does allow you to apply geometry onto a target surface kind of similar to texture mapping, but it's not a bitmap being applied, it's other objects being applied. See here for some more info and examples on that:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4856.2

There's also a free program called ZSurf which can build a "heightfield" NURBS surface based off of a bitmap, that may possibly be of use:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3825.2

But if you want something that works exactly like displacement mapping by applying bitmap textures, you probably want to be looking at using some kind of polygon mesh and rendering oriented program for producing that specific effect instead of doing that directly inside of MoI, since MoI is not itself focused on editing polygon mesh geometry.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thank you very much, I will try those out.

I appreciate your help.

Aysha