Combining Arroway Textures 'Diffuse, Bump and Specularity'?

beau21

Hey everyone.

I recently downloaded some of Arroway Textures different textures, wanting to use them for sketchup. I then found that there are 3 different "parts" to each material: diffuse, bump and specularity. One seems to be the main material, one for the depth and one for texture I'm guessing? Anyway.. when adding a texture to Sketchup there is not the ability to combine these three parts into one texture (as far as I know).. does anyone have a way to do this? Or a program to do this? I'm really open to anything, I just don't know what to do with the files.

Thanks!

Frederik

The files you mention can't be used in SU directly...
However, you can use them with most render application I can think of...
So... Unless you want to play with photo realistic renders, you can't use these files to anything...

Gaieus

So the way to use them - starting from SketchUp (and if going to PR rendering later) would be...
Use the diffuse material in SU. That's the "basic" colour map and if you are happy with the results, you can stop here.
You will only need the bump and specular maps if you are going to render it with a plugin or external application.

Note that over Arroway, they tell you with each material, how "big" their physycal size should be in real life. Best way to import them (as textures) to create an exactly same size of rectangle in SU, import the image as texture and still while in the import process, make sure to scale it on that rectangle from corner to corner. This will make the texture look realistically scaled (i.e. the length of one brick will not be smaller than an inch or larger than a foot or something...)

BTW Al Hart (of RenderPlus Systems) has already posted a bunch of them converted to skm files (the ones SU uses) here. An ideal solution fr lazy people...

beau21

Thank you for the clarification.

While on the top of rendering.. does anyone have any recommendations for the best rendering program for a Mac? (or maybe a couple at a few different price points) I looked at IRender nXt from Render Plus but, unless I missed it, there is no availability for a Mac.

Thanks again.

numbthumb

http://groups.google.com/group/SketchUp/web/resources#Renderers

solo

Beau21, what will you be rendering?

Is this for work or hobby?

What's your current experiance level with rendering?

Reason I ask is if it's just a hobby then price is a factor, if for work then finding the right solution at any cost is needed.