DreamDesign
Vue Explorations

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Elaborate Decor

Get very decorative without maxing out on polygons.

In our Vue, we have a scene, and in that scene we have a cabinet. The cabinet has a door with a brass handle. It's a nice door, but it's rather plain, and we want this to be a fancy cabinet door. Yet we don't want to add a lot of polygons to our scene. What can we do? Luckily, Vue lets us get fancy without adding much "weight" to the scene. To accomplish this for our door, let's move to our paint program, where we'll need to create 3 images. (Note: to create this design, I used a dingbat font element which was mirrored vertically and horizontally. I gave the design 3-dimensional texture using Blade Pro.) The first image is the decorative design we want to add to our door. Make it in full 24-bit color. The background can be filled or left blank. You want to create this image at least as large as it'll ever be when you render it. If you typically render extremely large images, you may want to make this as large as 1000 x 1000 pixels. Otherwise, 300 x 300 or 500 x 500 will do nicely. Whatever size you choose, all three of these images should have the same proportions; note that a square canvas shape will be easier to work with than a rectangle. The second image is the alpha mask for our design. Note the image area is solid black; what we want transparent is solid white. The third image is the grayscale version of our decoration, to become the bump map. Now that we have our images made, let's turn them into an image object in Vue. 1 - Add a Plane primitive to the scene. Rotate its position so that it stands vertically. 2 - With the Plane selected, right-click the Material summary and select Edit Material. When the material window opens, select New at the top left of the screen. Give this material a name; I called mine "Filigree." 3 - On the Color tab, select Mapped Picture, click the Picture button and navigate to where you stored your full color decoration image. 4 - On the Bump tab, right-click to open the Bump Function panel. Select Mapped Values, and when the screen changes, click the Picture button towards the bottom of the screen and navigate to where you stored your grayscale decoration image. 5 - On the Transparency tab, set the Transparency to 100%. To the middle, select Variable Transparency. This opens the Transparency Production editor to the right. Right-click that editor and select Mapped Values. Click the Picture button and navigate to where you stored your black & white image. Now align your Plane object as closely as you can against the cabinet door object, without accidentally "embedding" it. Do several preview renders to assure you're getting the best positioning. And hurray! Out cabinet door is now quite elaborately decorated, using a single Plane of only 2 polygons!