How to Convert Arroway Textures to .ArMaterial format

Saw a discussion on this, but it seems unintelligible. I purchased a wood texture library from Arroway. It comes in four file formats, but all are big Gbyte downloads. I would only wish to download in the format you would recommend. Should it be JPEG or PNG? Then once I have them what is the conversion procedure to turn them into .ArMaterial format? Please also send reply to my email jungd@mts.net

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Permalink Reply by Roy Hirshkowitz on September 15, 2015 at 8:03am

Either format works-- PNG has the highest quality-- JPEGS are smaller files with some (often undetectable) loss of quality.

Arroway textures are very high resolution. This is not required for most applications (unless you're doing a high-res closeup of your material.) These large files can negatively impact performance and memory usage. I would recommend downsizing the downloaded texture in an application like Gimp or Photoshop before you use it.

I'll let others comment on how to incorporate the textures into ArMaterial files in IRender nXt.

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on September 15, 2015 at 8:37am

After downloading a set of Arroway images, the instructions to create an ArMaterial from those images is here:

http://www.renderplus.com/wp2/wk/Texture_Set.htm

Please see if those instructions make sense.

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Permalink Reply by Dieter Jung on September 15, 2015 at 8:39am

Thanks Roy, advice is appreciated. I can always reduce resolution of the JPEG material files (I use Irfanview) and hopefully someone will supply me with information what resolution would be optimum to not to negatively affect performance and how to then convert to .ArMaterial. I bought the Arroway wood textures, because nothing in Sketchup or the free low resolution wood textures in IRender nXt gives very satisfactory rendered results.

Dieter

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Permalink Reply by Dieter Jung on September 15, 2015 at 9:22am

Rich thanks. Finding the function is quite obscure but I found it by trial and error.

Attachments:

Where to find the Arroway conversion function.jpg, 114 KB

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Permalink Reply by Roy Hirshkowitz on September 15, 2015 at 9:44am

For most applications a texture size of around 1 million pixels is more than adequate. 1000 x 1000 if the texture is square will do it. You can always increase the resolution if you don't like the quality.

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Permalink Reply by Dieter Jung on September 15, 2015 at 11:06am

Thanks Everyone

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Permalink Reply by Dieter Jung on September 16, 2015 at 12:42am

Rich,

I thought I was home-free too soon. The instructions you provided seemed clear enough but in applying them there are problems. 1st when a texture set is opened the resulting window that pops up is too tall and is not resizable. The OK button that needs to be clicked is off the screen, see attachment. Using a DEll XPS-15 laptop in its highest resolution 1366 x 768. There is however no need to make this window so long. So to get any further I have to switch the display into portrait mode, temporarily, so I have access to the okay button.

I left the adjustments in their default settings. Size is 2.6" and resolution 1024. Most of the other adjustments require expert knowledge of the effect they are to produce, and I don't know what the numbers mean, so I leave them alone. The Arroway jpg images are 3000 x 4000. My belief is the .ArMaterial file will downsized to the more performance optimum 1024 x 1024 size.

Clicking on OK occasionally produces some output, but most often it just hangs up. No noticeable CPU activity. In the 2nd screen image a file path is shown, but most of the time this is blank. The odd time it has produced an output (attachment 3). But then, even though I have closed down what I can , RPS-nxtMaterialEditor.exe is still consuming 80% of the CPU and I killed it using Task Manager.

Since I did seem to get one .ArMaterial files produced, I have some further question on these. The .ArMaterial file is only 9K in file size. Is this considered adequate resolution? The instructions also talk about multiple Image maps being selected. I can see four in attachment 1. However only one was actually turned into an ArMaterial file? Not sure what a Material Map is? I am thinking JPEG files in a folder. What is the process if I had 20 such JPEG material image files in a folder and I wanted to convert them. Are up to 4 selected at a time, or only one at a time?

Dieter

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