New Grades Of Metals???!

Just received a very fancy, partly-animated, e-posted ad for the latest TurboCAD version and additions.

TC has extremely powerful 3D rendering and lighting facilities, and the ad. shows a palette of metals in different colours and grades of reflectivity. The CGI picture is of a tiered display-stand holding little samples of them.

Among them are:

Iron

Steel

Shiny Steel

Steel Disney

Machine Steel

Galvanised 1

Galvanised 2 Disney

Rusty Metal Experimental.

Platinum

Mercury....

and other metals are indeed available.

The adjectives including "Disney" apply to some of the other metals, such as Brass and Gold, too.

So never mind all this EN1A, 080XXX or CZnnn stuff........ Just use Iron, Shiny Steel and Brass Disney in your latest project, and the Gold Medal's in your sights.

But Disney though?

Solid Edge has similar capabilities. I hardly use them, it's too much work. But when I wanted to see what an engine design looked like all tarted up, it did an excellent job. Designspark Mechanical on the other hand is best used to design the thing and do the colouring in, in your head.

Footnote:

Returned to the ad and read the rest of it. The very last line was an "Unsubscribe to newsletters" choice printed in Ariel 2pt very faint blue.

Newsletter - there's a grandiose name for an advertisement. I had never knowingly "subscribed" to any such periodical anyway.

Unsubscribed. I wonder if I'll receive plaintive messages from IMSI, asking me why and telling me I really need TC2023. (It's for very top-level, professional architectural and engineering work.)

So maybe I'll never find out what is Brass Disney - I've heard of Brass Necks, Brass Monkeys (owt to do with the Arctic??), and the Brass you need to buy Brass, but not that one!

Lee -

The previous versions of TC simply offer a palette of colours and a very simple rendering tool, which give quite effective results without delving into its really advanced regions.

I think Alibre does too, including letting you remove the "glue lines" .

Nothing new of course - 19C drawing-offices developed a set of near-standard hatching and tinting conventions for different materials. I think they would have been used more on sales and contract-negotiating drawings than the actual manufacturing ones.

Fusion has a lot of rendering options with many finishes available on a range of metals such as Cast, polished, satin, chromed anodised, etc

I expect Disney is an over blinged version of polished

The Alibre I have just uses colours with the option of some shadow and reflectivity which is enough for most things. I tend to use a couple of colours to indicate brass and bronze just to make it clearer to myself when building up the model on screen.

I've just done a set of drawings for an engine, the first two sheets one of traditional elevations of the GA and another with 3D isometric views of the assembled engine done in colour but the remaining 9 sheets of the indvidual parts are jsut line drawings which I prefer to work from

You have perhaps misinterpreted the intentions of the software.

They are textures and methods for 3D rendering not engineering specifications.

Given that Disney is one of the world leaders in animation, CGI and associated activities, examples of their work will be easy to find and thus serve as a baseline or benchmark. Hence 'steel Disney' is steel rendered in the style* that it would be rendered in a Disney production. You can search on 'Blender Disney textures' for another example of the concept.

* or perhaps according to a mathematical model developed by Disney. See:

https://disneyanimation.com/publications/ptex-per-face-texture-mapping-for-production-rendering/

Mmm … **LINK**

https://bytescare.com/blog/disney-copyright-infringement/#:~:text=Yes%2C%20Disney%20is%20known%20for,have%20infringed%20on%20its%20copyrights.

Bring on the Lawyers

MichaelG.

Aha!

I'd not associated software designed for architects and engineers, with the entertainments trades, but I can see the application to the former two for publicity material, even at a relatively simple level like a "walk-round" tour of a building or vehicle.

The cover page of the Disney paper raises another question in my mind.

Its illustration of a complicated mesh shows co-ordinate (?) directions in each element as V and U. Not X, Y, Z although it has to represent all those three in only only plane.

So what are V and U?

I have a mug fairly obviously from a museum gift-shop, remembering the 18C English mathematician, George Green. The mug has printed round its rim, one of his equations, quoted from a paper or a book by him.

I do not know how well it will reproduce in a text-editor like this, but let's try it...

ʃdxdydzUδV + ʃdσU dV/dw - 4 πU’’ =

ʃdxdydzVδU + ʃdσV dU/dw - 4 πV’ …..

Oooh, it has, at least so far, before posting the message! I found I had to break it over two lines.

Now, all I know there is that George Green made one bunch of squiggles the same as another. However, the d{x,y,z} bits and Pi make me think it is Integrating three-dimensional "things" . (Advanced mathematics was never possible for me.)

So are the Disney Studios' V and U for drawing cartoon dinosaurs, the same mathematical entities that Mr. Green discovered / invented for decorating coffee-mugs? Of what are they values?

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Incidentally, my original post was firmly tongue-in-cheek, but the advertisement did show more rendered than pure isometric work. It did have an example of a formal machine sub-assembly drawing, but whose stepped shape gave the whole thing an oddly Escher-esque look.

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IMSI's agent Paul ('The CAD' ) Tracey recently offered to sell me the same TurboCAD 2023. I had bought the 2019 'Deluxe' - i.e. basic - version, from his stand at a model-engineering exhibition; and TC2021 remotely from him early this year. The latter only because I thought TC2019 would not work on MS WIN-10; now 11, enforced by Microsoft.

I replied with thank-you, but I cannot use TC's 3D mode, only orthographic, and then not very often now anyway. So don't need all that rendering etc.

TC is good for geometrical plotting though, distinct from design drawing; by modifying standard methods familiar from manual mathematics and draughting. I used it recently for just such a purpose.

Edited By Nigel Graham 2 on 20/07/2023 09:22:57

Edited By Nigel Graham 2 on 20/07/2023 09:24:07

This stirs distant memories of Calculus. The common theme appears to be the relationship betwen the distance traelled by a point in the x (dx = Delta x), y and z directions to the initial and final velocities of the point. Now dw rings a bell, but very faintly as my university days ended 50 years ago!

Gordon

Edited for clarity

Edited By GordonH on 20/07/2023 09:41:56

U & V relate to the scaling of the chosen texture

It's the line between creation design and artwork

That MOI CAD has some amazing examples

In 3d computer graphics objects exist in a space defined by the cartesian coordinates X, Y, and Z.

If you want to map a texture* onto an object you generally won't get satisfactory results if you use XYZ coordinates - imagine you want a chequer board effect on a cylinder, simply projecting a chequer board pattern in the XY plane (say) will work OK-ish if viewing from XY, but the texture will be all smeared out round the sides.

So what you do is 'unwrap' the surface of the object and lay it flat (simple for a cylinder), then you can project your texture onto it onto the flattened surface. The coordinate system used for these texture projections is defined as UVW (to distinguish it from XYZ). In practice, W isn't usually used and you use the UV space which is a square, 1.0 units in each direction:

Unwrapping a cylinder is easy, and the 3D program can do this automatically; more complex shapes, for example a human head, require a lot of hand work to unwrap and sort out into a pattern which can be painted. It may appear to bear little relationship to the 3D object.

This is a texture map for a head. You can see it's been cut up into bits like a dressmakers pattern:

And this is the head it was painted for:

* A texture being an image whether photographic, painted by an artist or generated by some semi-random programmatic process

Very informative post, Andy … Thank You

MichaelG.

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That said … there appears to be an image AWOL

Are you sure it doesn’t just mean that the one steel shines but the next one Disney?

Sorry just couldn’t resist that one.

regards Martin

Groan!

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Very interesting replies!

I tried to find the mug but failed - I have a horrible feeling I'd gone and broken it!

However I looked back at the 'Word' copy and that has italic "w" so I don't know if it was a "w" or lower-case omega. I think I'm right that it's conventional now in Theoretical Mechanics for rotation calculations - I forget if for angle or angular velocity - but I don't know if Green used it, nor what for.

Without knowing what that equation is about, and anyway it is lifted from its context, with a " .....3" after it, I don't know if its U and V there are those used in modern texture calculations. Though they might be.

My original guess when I salvaged the mug from a clear-out at work, was that Green was analysing solids, by the dz bits.

Then, wondered I by the two Pi terms, for a solid of revolution whose bounding shape is mathematically definable but not by a single, regular y=[x^n] type curve? It is an odd value, 4pi (12.5664...), but I recall it occurs in the formula for the volume of a sphere.

Further, I wondered if his U and V are Area and Volume, but why U, not A?

Given that George Green was alive in the 18C I tried to think what particular applications he had in mind, or if it was just an exercise in very arcane Pure Mathematiks. It would not have been for artistic work, but map projections, perhaps, e.g. how to represent the irregular shapes of continents on a globe, accurately on a flat sheet?

......

The same clearing unearthed the original report of an experiment; typed text and hand-written algebra. One page was so stuffed full of Calculus, one equation having five definite-integral signs at its head, that it looked like a sketch of a swannery. I am impressed that someone had found it easy to feed a big load of numbers (the readings) into Extremely Complicated Algebra, having developed the ECA itself for the purpose in what would seem a sort of circular argument, and solve it to obtain the Results.

Ironically the mechanical part of that experiment, about vibrations in some sort of material, was just an ordinary hammer screwed to a wooden metre-rule swinging on a hook.

Thanks Michael. I don't know why one image is on strike. My Samsung tablet says it can't find the page, but this is pure laziness as It appears as expected on my desktop (both using Firefox).

As for the redoubtable Mr. Green's squiggles, they're all Greek to me...

I noticed that too. Your textures-table has just managed to find its way to my computer too, so it's not your tablet.

...

Squiggles? By the end of a two-week holiday on Crete I could just about pronounce from the phrase-book the Physics expression on the end of a warehouse-style building in the town. Though not understand the word until I recalled where I'd seen Phyto previously. Of course! Plants! The building was a nursery or garden-centre.

Andy

Thanks for checking … It would appear that there must be some problem in your Album

The address looks good, but there’s no-one there

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MichaelG.

How odd. It works for me on the desktop computer, in the thread, in my album, and typing in the address from your screenshot.

Not so with the tablet, except when I navigate from the "35 photos" link under my name (It's in the "Misc" album).