Explore how to accurately render a perforated screen in your design project using different asset materials and cutout options. Learn how to adjust the size, spacing, and color of the perforations to match your vision, and how to ensure your modifications don't impact your other material assets.
Key Insights
- For a realistic screen effect, it's essential to choose a different asset for the screen material rather than using the same asset as the mullion, to give the screen a perforated appearance.
- Using the cutouts option, you can select the shape (circles, squares, hexagons, etc.), size, and spacing of the perforations. It's possible to create a custom asset and adjust these parameters until the screen matches your desired look.
- Checking and adjusting other materials in your design, such as glass, is equally important to ensure an appropriate asset is used, ensuring consistency and realism across your project.
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Keeping with the same theme of the lesson here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually take a look at this perforated screen material. So right now, if I were to just do a quick rendering of this view, just doing a quick draft rendering, just so we can see what it looks like. I'll even zoom in a little closer here.
You'll see that all of these materials are going to look the same. This guy here, the mullion and the perforated screen, all are going to have the same appearance to them because they're all using the same asset. And so we clearly don't want that for the screen.
We'd like it to actually look somewhat perforated. So you can see here, not perforated at all. And so we're going to take a look at that and see what we can do to get it to look, look the way we want to.
And so I'll start by selecting it, going to edit type, editing that material structure, and then it says aluminum screen. And we're one step away from this, but we need to just make sure we're using a different asset. And like we talked about before, using satin, which is the same as the one that's on this aluminum, isn't going to work for us.
We need to go in and we need to replace the asset with something else. And so when I go to replace it, what I want to do is I can actually look through the different materials. And what I'm going to do actually here is I'm going to duplicate this one first, and it gives me just satin one.
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And when we look through, you can see here's all the different information, aluminum screen, the different description of it. And then we have our appearance here, which under the information, we can change the name to something different if we wanted to. So I can call it aluminum screen, because that makes a lot more sense than satin one, right? And then we can replace it with a different one, or we can modify it as is.
And so we have those options to where I could go in and I could say the cutouts, which are going to be the perforations, are what I want to have added to this one. And so you can see there's the staggered circle. If I check this box, I have all these different options for the different cutouts I have.
And if you're not willing to go through the effort of creating your own custom one, like we're doing here, you can always go through and use that replace asset. And I'm not going to guarantee it, but it's going to be pretty close to saying that there's going to be a lot of different types of metals in here. So you can see I'm in the different types of aluminum and there may or may not be a perforated one in here, but there's going to be something that's really close to what you're looking for.
And so in our case, by simply going in and grabbing these, the cutouts option and saying the checkbox there, we can go in and I can say whether I want staggered circles, straight circles, squares, hexagons, whatever we're looking to use. And then I can adjust the size and the spacing of it throughout at this point, because it's its own asset. Now I can even go in and change the color and I don't have to worry about it impacting the rest of my material assets because it's its own thing now.
We're going to start with just the staggered circles with this size at this point in time, and then we'll go ahead and adjust it if we need to. So let's go ahead and hit okay to get out. And then we'll go in and do a quick rendering just to see what it looks like.
Again, I'm just doing a quick one, making sure it's on draft and then screen, because that's typically going to be a lower resolution and it should render pretty quickly here. As we see it kind of coming into focus, you can see there's our perforations there and it'll be up to you whether you look at that and you think those are a little too big or maybe they're not large enough for your taste. And I think maybe depending on the type of screen you're looking at doing, these would be pretty large.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and reduce it by half. So I'll jump back into that material, into that appearance tab. And then it's as simple as just going in here instead of having a diameter of 0.5, I can change it to 0.25. And the spacing, we'll have to see how that works out, but I have a feeling we're going to want to reduce that as well to make it more frequent.
So I will go with a 0.35 on that one. And so we have smaller circles at a tighter frequency. And let's take a look at the rendering again.
And so looking at this frequency and the spacing, that looks much better. We're going to stick with that. And now we've set up our exterior materials.
So the last one I want to look at here is the glass material. And this is just me double checking to make sure the glass material is an appropriate asset. We can see this is our appearance.
And it's really just set up as clear glazing, which is totally fine. So I'm going to hit OK. And during this stage of the project, we're doing a lot of things that are going to be kind of intense on your computer.
So it's a good idea to do a lot of this quick save.
