Gain complete control over the formation of your structure by combining the height settings with a gamma curve and product specifications. These controls help to fine tune any structure, and these can be saved as ‘profiles’ and loaded into any new simulation using our Palette Technology.
Achieving accurate product simulations on screen requires some initial set up. We recommend you have some of the product in front of you, and balance what you see on screen to what you see on the product, and repeat this process for each finishing process you use. The section at the bottom of this article explains how to save each product profile to easily load into other designs, or share with colleagues.
- The sidebar on the left hand side of the 3D Designer Window contains all the controls you need. If it is not visible, just click on the Toggle Sidebar button at the top of the window.
- Using the top section of the sidebar, click on the block beside the layer(s) you want to act as the height map and gloss layer(s):
- Click on the star beside the layer you want to act as the gloss layer:
- Use the slider bar to enter the height for the height map layer, or click on the value to enter it using microns (µm).
- Leave the height of the gloss layer set to 0. The controls below help to describe how glossy the product is.
- Smoothing - controls how smooth the structure is
- Display Shadows - will display shadows where the height of the structure casts a shadow on itself
- Gloss Intensity - describes how intense that glossiness is. 0 = a matt finish, and 4 = high gloss.
- Material Roughness - describes the surface appearance of the product. A low value increases the amount of gloss seem on the product. A high value increases the roughness of the surface and therefore decreases the visibility of the gloss.
- Gamma Curve - used the describe how to structure looks after production.
Note: Depending of the engraving characteristics, you may find the 'Stairs Gamma: Create and export stepped tones as bitmap layers' article interesting to read. You can find this listed below, in the Related Articles.
Adjusting the production curve
The gamma curve helps to describe what happens to gradients in production. If your engraving department have a curve, this can be loaded into this window (hold down ^ (control key) on the keyboard and click on the gamma curve and select Open), Doing this will give you a better, more accurate simulation of the production in the 3D Designer Window.
To help you understand the importance of the gamma curve, a few examples are shown below:
