i have a model here that i am needing to export as an stl for 3d printing but i need the surface to be a textured plastic similar to the small bumpy faux leather surface you would see on the interior of a car. i have the texture worked out rhino and am able to apply the material so it looks correct but in rhino this is for rendering purposes only. am i able to change this from a nurbs to a mesh/stl and get that surface texture to be part of the model so it will be there when i print?
Check this: Displacement in Rhino 7
hi and thanks. that was a fairly intense video. a ton of info there but i think i got what i needed out of it.
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so i am digging in a little deeper on this and i am running into some roadblocks which i believe are due to filetypes but i am not too sure. i have downloaded a bunch of material files online and have used the “downloadlibrarytextures” command. everything that has been downloaded is in a ".rmtl filetype. i can use that in rhino to get a really nice render and get my part looking just the way i want it but i cant seem to use that to make a displacement mesh. i seem to have to just delete all that from my model and go directly to the displacement tab and use just the files available to me there which are .rtex files. if i go in the displacement tab, no rtml files are shown as i assume they are not compatible? is there any way to extract a render mesh using an rtml file?
Hi @jimc
You need to look the material up in the material editor to see what the texture used as the bump map is called. This is the texture you need to look for in the dropdown menu in the displacement panel.
(in this case, just grabbed from my currently open file, the bump texture in the material editor is called “Cast Iron normal 3K” - yours will obviously be called something else).
HTH, Jakob
Bump maps are a faked effect. The displacement map is the only map that will actually displace the model.
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ok so just making sure i understand correctly. to do this you need multiple files. one file, an .rmtl, and you need another file that matches or goes along with that to give you the 3d displacement texture? of the probably 1000 materials i downloaded, none of them had any other bump map or matching file to go along with it. they were .rmtl only. those i guess are just to be used as a render on screen and cannot be exported as a displacement? for me an on screen render is useless. i need to apply surface textures to the models.
Um…not really no? .rmtl files don’t matter. What matters are the bump map files–and you need “bump maps” not “normal maps” and they need to be very good bump maps that actually have a proper gradient from “high” to “low”–which I suppose are embedded in the .rmtl. files.
Please note that unless you are extremely handy with Photoshop and very patient and using a resin printer this is not likely to actually work very well. I’ve only ever used it to enhance renderings, and: the displacement feature may not capture the texture very well at all, your mesh size will be sent to the moon, edges and corners will be problematic–all the usual difficulties of texturing, just times 10–it’ll require tuning to even see how your printer will capture it, using “fuzzy skin” options in your slicer may be a lot easier, though it may still send your print times to unreasonable lengths.
ok i think i understand it now. i will play around with it some more. i have been using rhino since v5 came out but only here and there. i have never dived into the render side of things so this is all new to me.
resin printer yes, which is why i am now exploring this. my fdm printers from long ago would never reproduce any of this.
thanks to everyone who responded