Generate floor boards quick and easy, part VI

This version (0.0.8) of the floor board generator adds options to add twists and hollow curvature to the individual planks. This is useful when creating floors in older houses and its more subtle simply rotation planks. All the options are now visually grouped as well to aid the user in locating related options.

The floor board generator is documented in several blog articles. Apart from the one you are reading now, the series consists of:

Part I

initial version

Part II

random uv-coordinates

Part III

random vertex colors

Part IV

additional options

Part V

randomization

The latest version of the code is available from GitHub and is tracked in the Blender Extensions tracker (although most of the discussion is in this BlenderArtists thread.

An example (with a flat material to emphasize the subtle curvature) is shown below (click to enlarge):

The option values used to create the image are shown in the next image. Note that for illustrative purposes we made the gaps between the planks quite large:

Parameterization

The biggest change in this version was already visible in the image above: parameters no longer appear in the toolbar but in the FloorBoards section of the modifier options. This is not only a visual change but it actually means that even after savinf the .blend file all relevant parameters are retained along with the abject and can be tweaked at any time. (Thanks floric for the code adaptation and DragonLEE for the original idea)

Generate floor boards quick and easy, part IV

In a previous post I added some extra functionality to the floor board generator and based on user feedback and code contributions there are now some more options:

• the offset can now be random for each individual row of planks (thanks Alain for your contribution)
• adding modifiers is now optional (but on by default)
• adding random offsets to the uv-map for each plank is now optional (but on by default)

Code availability

This new version (0.0.6) is available for download from GitHuband is tracked in the Blender extensions tracker as well.

Generate floor boards quick and easy, part III, vertex colors

A member at BlenderArtists really wanted to apply a random material to each individual plank. Now Cycles can generate a unique random number for each object but not for each face within an object so another trick was needed. I therefo , added a vertex color layer with a unique color for each plank. Vertex color layers may be accessed from Cycles with an attribute node as shown in the node setup below:

In the example we use the color directly but of course it can be treated as a random value to control some specific material property ad well, that is left as an exercise for the reader.

Code availability

The code is available on GitHub but as I hope to promote it to the Contrib repository one time, it's also in the Blender upload tracker.

Generate floor boards quick and simple

I am updating this addon, check for an update this article.

I am currently enrolled in Andrew Price's Architecture Academy and in one of his tutorials he mentioned how easy it would be to have a simple script that could create floor boards suitable for architectural renders like those available in some other modelling packages. He even thought about asking someone to develop it but for some reason or other it never came te be.

Add Floor Boards

Because I think it would make a useful addition to the ArchViz' modeller 's tool set I put together a simple script Add Floor Boards. Once installed it can be found in the Add->Mesh menu at the to of the 3D view. Slap on a decent wood shader and you have a floor with real geometry in a few seconds.

The object that is generated by the script is a simple collection of rectangular faces adorned with a solidify and a bevel modifier so you can tweak some stuff even after the tool properties are no longer accessible.

Installation

• Download the script from GitHub
• Click File->User Preferences->Addons and click the install script from file
• Don't forget to enable the add-on, it can be found in the Add Mesh section

Usage

After clicking Add->Mesh->Add Floor Board a default floor board is generated. The tool options should be self explanatory and are shown below:

Note that the measures are in blender units and the defaults reflect typical oak boards available at my local floor board dealer and are denoted in meters. (If you do archviz work it makes sense tp select some units in the scene options). Note that the variations in length and width are added to the base measurements so set them to zero if you want comlletely regular planks (a fixed width is quite common, a fixed length not so much as it leads to waste).