Old Steel Cable by Kisakumedia

I can't believe nobody has commented on this yet!

Amazing job!!

Your climbing rope texture is totally excellent as well. I'm excited to see your future stuff, hope you stick around and keep it up!

uhm, can it do a single strand?

Cool! I like the Diffuse map by itself more than the final texture It'd make for an awesome corrugate metal texture as well

Larger cables are made of a bunch of little cables twined together, then those are twisted together again. The big cable in this pic shows it.



Since the texture tiles both H and V you would simply wrap it around a cylinder (like I did with a column texture in this thread: http://www.filterforge.com/forum/read...ssage59607 ) then continue it vertically. Voila!

Thank you for all your comments!
I'm glad you like my filter and I hope it's of any use to you

I see that there is some hot discussion going on there so I try to explain everything to you as good as I can.

First of all, thank you KGtheway2B for your hard work trying to explain whats going on in 3D.
Thank you Kraellin for your questions, I'm pretty sure, that there are more people who want to know how this will work in 3D.

I made some quick screenshots to demonstrate how I use these textures in practice (these are the new textures, coming with the update, as soon as it makes it to the server ):

I'm starting with the first preset that is rotated 45 degrees:

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Just a quick hint here: Its not so important if the texture is rotated in the first place or not. With the second texture, I will show you how to get the same results with non rotated images.

Applied on a simple cylinder (with some bending):

with visible edges

without visible edges
This is how it will look like on the 3D model, but in order to achieve this result, the UV-Layout (2D projection of all the 3D faces) has to be created.

First of all, the screenshot of the UV-Layout:

It shows all the faces of the cylinder.


Link to full size
Here you can see how the texture (that is tiled some times) is projected on to the 3D geometry, controlled by the UV-Layout.

But how does it work with this texture?


It's very simple in this example. Just rotate the UV-Layout instead of the texture:

Link to full size

I hope you could follow along with my little tutorial
If you want some more detailled information, i could make a video tutorial or something like that but only if can spare some free-time.

Have fun with my texture and try the updated version as soon as it is uploaded!

I don't understand how this is still confusing you...

Can you show an example of your supposed "non convoluted" method?

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Kraellin wrote: it just seems pretty convoluted to me when you could make one 2d cable and simply wrap it around your 3d object.

I guess what you mean is to make a photo from a real cable and wrap it around the 3D model, right? Or did you mean to make a texture of a single cable?

Getting good images from real steel cables is very hard and even harder to make it fit to the desired 3D model. It's not impossible though. There are people who do it that way, but I think you have more control with self-created textures.
If you meant to make a 2D cable texture and wrap it around, then I can tell you that this is exactly what I was doing here
It may not look like it but this filter creates a piece of a cable, or several cables (you can set the repeat count to 1 to get only 1 cable piece).
The reason why only a piece of the whole cable is used, is to safe texture space/resolution. In 3D, it's always better to repeat small textures than having one big texture.
But that's an art of itself