How To Add Texture To Stl File

Step one: What is Bump Mapping?

Printing CAD shapes on 3D printers is pretty simple. For unmarried-colour, FDM prints you tin just import the native files into GrabCAD Print and print them:

Readers of my previous tutorial volition know, for a elementary full-color workflow, you lot can only add 1 more step, inserting a program similar Photoshop or Rhino which can successfully map textures onto VRML files:

Just in both those workflows, any changes to your 3D shape were washed in your CAD programme, and past a human. You lot had to manually move faces, planes, features around, adding holes or fillets i by one. That works smashing for engineering shapes, just there are a lot more textures found in nature:

Can you imagine trying to model any of those in CAD? Like, actually making a sketch and trying to extrude those shapes in your 3D models? That would accept forever, right?

But sometimes in 3D press y'all want models that have those types of textures on exterior surfaces, for realism. So we're going to modify our workflow to allow a computer to make all those pocket-size, complex, quasi-random texture dips and divots for usa:

(I'm showing Rhino in that workflow, yous could probably use Photoshop or Maya or Blender or many other 'artistic' CAD packages as well. Rhinoceros was but the easiest for me.)

Just to exist articulate, in normal texture mapping (which nosotros've covered before), we're combining a 3D shape with a 2nd image, but our event is withal as perfectly smooth as the shape was, coming out of CAD:

Only what we're going to practice is combine that 3D shape and 2nd prototype in such a manner that the white parts of the image actually project OUT from the sphere, and the dark spots really remain Smoothen, so what we'll end up with is a textured model of the moon where y'all can actually feel the mountains and lava plains:

And out in the wider world, a lot of people use the terms "texture mapping" and "crash-land mapping" interchangeably, but for the purposes of this tutorial, I mean:

Texture Mapping = the 3D part does not take its geometry changed by applying the image

Bump Mapping = the 3D part DOES have its geometry altered by applying the image (information technology gets 'bumpy')

Afterward this tutorial is over, you can phone call them whatever you want, but those are the terms we'll utilise here. Here'south more info on bump mapping, if you need it.

At present allow's get started.

Stride 2: Applying Simple Bump Maps in Rhino

I'm starting off in Rhino with this smooth, circular shape:

(Side note: I'm using a sphere I created from scratch in Rhino with the "Solid...Sphere..." command. Theoretically, the steps that follow should work equally well on STLs or VRMLs you import, but I'm having trouble getting the renders to show on imported files. We already know imported VRMLs can be textured in Rhino per my previous rocket tutorial, and then it must exist a setting I'm missing. If I figure out what information technology is, I'll update this paragraph here.)

The bump mapping process will increase the thickness of the sphere where there is white (or lighter colors) in your image, and go out the thickness alone where there is black (or darker colors) in the image.

And then to make that easy, nosotros're going to start off with a simple texture image similar this:

The black and white areas are very well defined, there aren't any other colors involved, and if you stare at it long enough you go empty-headed, so that's a plus.

(If you get through the balance of this tutorial with your own image and have trouble controlling the boundaries between your high and low areas, return here and use my checkerboard image until y'all've got the hang of information technology – it's a simple way to outset.)

The adjacent footstep is to plow on your Textures Panel found under your "Render Tools" tab. Luckily the icon looks but like my vertigo-inducing checkerboard from above:

That will open some other window, and hit the little plus sign to add together a texture:

The texture tin be whatsoever image yous accept. I'grand starting with one of the stock checkerboard patterns in Rhino so making it repeat x times in the U and V direction:

You want it to echo and then that there isn't just i big blackness square adjacent to one big white one on the meridian one-half of my globe – it should be a small, continuously repeating pattern.

At present that my texture is divers, I tin do the bump map. Rhino actually calls this command "Utilize Displacement" and the orange icon looks like exactly what we're going to do to our sphere:

In the Apply Displacement panel, cull the texture we divers earlier and always striking the "Preview" button to see what information technology will do to your shape:

Now, that sphere is wacky, but at least it's easy to see what the texture is doing, right? This is why we started with a simple image outset. I turned down the white elevation from 1.0 to 0.xx, hitting OK and now our simple bump map is completed:

This shape is what your actual 3D model looks like now. Information technology can exist textured, exported into other programs, and 3D printed similar whatever other STL or VRML. While preparing for this tutorial I really used this aforementioned texture on a cylinder out of SOLIDWORKS and and then applied a texture later in Photoshop to see what would happen, and the results looked great and printed out but fine:

And so now permit's make it more complex with our Moon example.

Footstep 3: Applying COMPLEX Bump Maps in Rhinoceros

So now we're going to have that same sphere and apply this much more complex prototype to it:

(And BIG thanks to GrabCAD Employee Owen Orsini for thinking up this Moon example, finding the prototype and actually DOING the prints in his spare time – he worked out the bugs for us!)

So this time, we're going to apply that texture as a zero-thickness texture map get-go, like you would with any other texture in Rhino:

This will make the final image not only crash-land mapped, but texture mapped, so information technology looks better.

And so, ascertain that Moon prototype equally a texture like we did before:

Then apply the deportation (bump map):

And we finally accept our beautiful texture-mapped AND bump-mapped model:

Pro tip #1: if you HADN'T applied the texture mapping earlier the bump mapping, your bump mapping might look really ugly and faceted, with abrupt little triangular mountains everywhere. But the texture on top hides all those piffling details and makes information technology look crawly. E'er texture map Before bump mapping!)

Pro tip #two: Because bump mapping is creating a LOT of actress information in your mesh, expect your bump mapped model to be many times the file size of your normal ones. Just compare this bump mapped moon to just the texture mapped version:

And you can even meet that extra information on your GrabCAD Print tray:

At present it's time to see the results!

Step iv: Results!

Information technology'due south very hard to convey how cool this crash-land-mapped Moon feels via pictures, but I recall this epitome shows the results pretty well:

Only you really see the difference when you hold both the smooth and bump mapped versions side by side:

Looking closely, you can even see the smoothen of my desk lamp on the upper right surface of the texture mapped model, that's how smooth it is. But the bump mapped version doesn't have whatsoever smooth surface like that to reverberate from!

So who could use bump mapping with 3D printing? Anyone who'southward trying to get one of these effects:

All in all, this is an crawly and powerful mode to utilise a total-color printer. And if you desire to learn more nigh the affordable, FULL-color printers that can sit correct next to you in your office and churn out useful models, bank check out our new J55 printer at this link.

Happy printing!

AUTHOR'S EDIT 1/xviii/xix:

Per all the comments, I gauge I should have called this tutorial "How to apply DISPLACEMENT Mapping", which is a more authentic term for what's going on than "Bump Mapping". But instead of changing every film in the tutorial and making the comments seem out of identify, I'1000 leaving it every bit is. I use the term "Displacement Mapping" in my later SOLIDWORKS tutorial , so thanks to the commenters for helping me grow and learn!

Source: https://grabcad.com/tutorials/how-to-create-incredibly-complex-textured-shapes-for-3d-printing-using-bump-mapping