Objective

Develop a method to form distortion free procedural drop textures for industrial engraving. Drop patterns are commonly used to break repeats.

Mechanics

Due to the boundary condition:

‍ ‍f (0,y) = f (1,y-ax) where a is the drop fraction in this case 0.4

there is an inherent distortional shear at the exact angle of the pattern drop.

With Adobe Substance, a directional warp is used to exactly counteract this shear, at an angle negative to the drop, (in this case -21.8 degrees). The warp strength is then adjusted to eliminate distortion.

To increase pattern detail or size, the sbsrender.exe file is called from a batch file, enabling direct writing of 16K output files.

By sampling the domain in 4 quadrants, writing these 4 different domain files, then putting them back together at the proper offsets, a mathematically seamless drop texture of 32K is constructed.

To make this process easier, the attached batch file, Carve_4_tiles.bat enables input of Domain_X and Domain_Y into the pixel processor, then writes the necessary 4 quadrant tiles to the disk.

Bypassing Adobe’s 8K Hard Cap

The native max output of Adobe 3D Substance is 8K, not enough for industrial engraving applications.

The one-click batch file, run_stitcher.bat, runs the Python script bridging the domain outputs into a single 32K seamless drop file.

Over 1 billion pixels are processed directly in system RAM quickly and efficiently, with 16-Bit, LZW tiff compressed output.

Be Creative

Put your own designs in the engine. See increased detail and break-up repeat patterns.