How to use Pattern Cooler with DAZ Studio
This thread was created to respond to a question from Novica posted here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/20962/#309131
(Trying not to completely hijack that other thread!)
There is a neat online pattern generation tool called Pattern Cooler here: http://www.patterncooler.com/editor/
It is free for personal use. Printed and commercial use have restrictions. Please read those here: http://www.patterncooler.com/
The author has a donate button, where you can offer your financial support for the project, if you want to.
I have used Pattern Cooler to generate patterns that I use in the Diffuse Color channel of clothing. I use with The Fabricator to apply a weave to texture the garment. Pattern Cooler also has an option to embed a texture in the pattern that it generates, if you don't have The Fabricator, or just don't want to bother with it. One thing to be aware of with using The Fabricator or the embedded texture is that its appearance will be dependent on the tiling you choose for the pattern in the Surfaces tab. The Fabricator is designed for tiling of 10, I believe. Some weaves like Satin work well at all tiling, it seems. The Fabricator is available in the DAZ store here: http://www.daz3d.com/the-fabricator
In this example I used Wilmap's free Gathered Dress available at ShareCG here: http://www.sharecg.com/pf/full_uploads.php?pf_user_name=wilmap
I used DAZ Studio 4.5.1.56, Firefox, and Windows 7 to capture these screen shots.
OK, enough preliminaries...
Comments
Continued
You can choose different tiling values for different surfaces of the garment, to get interesting effects. Here I set tiling to a smaller value on the dress bodice, to get one large pattern. I set tiling to a negative value on the sleeves. (Didn't even know you could use negative values before I tried it)
This render did not use The Fabricator.
Here I use The Fabricator to apply a Satin weave to give the dress an opulent sheen.
Thanx for sharing, very cool, a new gadget to have fun with :-)
Here I used The Fabricator Boucle weave. Applying that weave reset my tiling to 10. I had to go back and change tiling to my desired values. Notice how the scale of the boucle texture is larger on the bodice, where the tiling value is smaller than the skirt. The Fabricator textures (like any bump and displacement values) are scaled according to the tiling value of the surface.
SQUEEEEE!
Well, you answered my question, alright! Thank you SO much! You've got above and beyond, that's for sure. Will post an new link in my Art Studio of course!
Is there something special about having the tiles 65 x 65? Is that standard?
When I use one, I am definitely donating at LEAST a dollar for each one- this is very reasonable!
Hmmm... where did you see 65 by 65? I select 200% for the resize, to get the a higher resolution PNG from the download. The pattern I saved is 520 by 520. At 100% I get 260 by 260. Maybe you selected 25%? I recommend selecting 200% and using DAZ Studio tiling to make the pattern smaller on the garment. That seems to work best for me.