How to copy props/how to build a wall?

odastein

So, I want to make a wall covered of tiles. I created a small plane and put onto it the image of my tile. However, to make my wall, I need maybe a hundred such tiles, put side by side. What the most convenient/quicker way to do that? What's the most convenient/quicker way to get 100 identical tiles? What's the most convenient/quicker way to put them side by side?

Of course there might be a way to build my tiled wall without copying the elements...let me know.

In fact a complementary question, still about building a wall. Let's assume now that I want an uniform wall. Let's say 9x3 meters. Planes are square. If I create a 3x3 plane, put on it an image of the material, and then scale to 3x9, the material is deformed and looks wrong, so at first glance I need to create three 3x3 planes, put my material on each of them, and then put them side by side. Is there a way to avoid that, for instance by creating a *rectangular*, 3x9 plane?

Thanks in advance.

Richard Haseltine

You can use the tiling settings in the Surfaces pane to have your tile image repeat the required number of times. That's gernally the best way to handle something like this, though you can use Instances as an efficient way to build actual tiles (and the Align pane, Window>Panes(Tabs)>Align, will help place them uniformly).

Chezjuan

I think if you use the tiling settings, you can fix the issue of the distorted image due to scaling. I would guess you can make the horizontal tile number 3X higher than vertical and that would work.

Another solution could be a transparency map: Use photoshop or another photo editor to make a white square, then paint 2/3 of it black. Apply the map in the Cutout Opacity of the plane, and it will hide all the parts where black appears. But if the tiling method works, trans maps are too much work.

JonnyRay

Tiling should work. Here's what I did to show it.

1) I created a simple small white tile image

2) In Studio, I created a simple 3m x 3m plane and applied the image in the base color channel once. You get what you'd expect, 1 3m square tile.

3) Then I changed the horizontal and vertical tiles to 15 x 15. Now it looks like a tiled wall.

4) When I scale the plane 300% in the X dimension, I get the stretching that you talked about. Kind of look like "subway tiles" as that style of tile is called, but now what you were hoping for.

5) I increased just the hoizontal tiles to 45 and left the vertical tiles at 15 and got the sqare tiled wall back again.

odastein

Thank you for your answers. However, maybe I'm an idiot, but I couldn't find "tiling" in the surface panel 

JonnyRay

You have to make sure it's using the Iray Uber shader first. By default Studio creates primitives with 3Delight shaders (which don't have tiling options). So after you create the plane, select it, and load the Daz Uber Shader to start with, then you can tile away. :)

Richard Haseltine

All surfaces should have the tiling property, as far as I know - the iray Uber Sahder adds the ability to tile diffrent maps indepently, while the default settings apply to every map on that surface.

odastein

Ok, I'll look again, after loading Uber if needed. Maybe I somehow missed the tiling option.