Second part: texturing

 

Painting a pattern...

Since its 1.1.7 version, Arabeske has allowed internal texturing using a colour palette. Therefore, using external tools like Gimp or Photoshop is no longer necessary.

The best way to see how it works is to try an example. Open the demo pattern, from the aide. You should get this:

Of course, we are only interested in the pattern made of lines: circles are only here to guide us when building the pattern.

The painting system is very simple: the idea is to place coloured "paint drops", which fill the whole area available inside the enclosing lines, a bit like enamel. In blueprint mode, only the drops are visible. The painting appears in final and interlace modes.

Click on Texture. The "object properties" window shows several fields (fig 2) . At the bottom, two selectors change the way the colour or texture will appear.

The "Type" menu tells which elements of the pattern are textured:

• standard - the closed area around the drop;
• background - All the empty space not filled by another texture. This does not concern lines. Default colour is black;
• lines - The lines themselves. Default colour is light grey;
• grooves The grooves inside interlaced lines. Default colour is black.

The "symmetry" menu allow partial effect of the chosen symmetry group on the current texture:

• standard - colours placed at a given point are automatically repeated exactly as the symmetry group demands.
• no symmetry - as the name suggest, symmetries are not taken into account, but rotations and translations are. Thus a texture is copied as in p6 if the chosen symmetry group is p6m.
• translations only - textures are applied but once per pattern translation repetition.

Let's try on a simple example:

1. Go to blueprint mode and zoom back (at least to ZOOM ->X/2), as in figure 3.

2. Click Texture. When the object properties window appears, click at the center of the drawing area (do not change the "type" and "symmetry" selectors yet). A white dot appears, representing the texture drop, copied according to the p6m symmetry group (fig 3). Going into final mode, the texture acts as shown in figure 3a.

The colour can be change clicking on colour. Arabeske features three ways to choose a colour: palette, HSB or RGB.

For instance, choose orange.

Now, to create another texture, click at the suitable place on the drawing area, in blueprint mode. This time, let's put some greyish paint above the hexagon.

And now, some turquoise paint. But this time, select Type -> Background. Back in final mode, the effect is clear: nothing changed, except for the areas which were not painted yet, which take the new colour. Lines and other textures are intact.

Now you can take a try for yourself, using lines and groove textures. When new textures are added, the object list is updated, taking into account the main features of the textures: palette number between brackets, drop coordinates between parentheses.

The palette number has only one use: if the image is exported in order to be used as an index map for software like POV-Ray or Virtualight which can map a different texture for each index of a paletted picture. Index values must be in the 0-255 range. 0, 1 and 2 are reserved, respectively for background, lines and grooves.

... and bitmap textures

Select the latest texture (turquoise), and click bitmap.

From the file chooser, select a pattern for the background in an image directory. Something like, for instance, the sky shown here.

The selected image, repeated as much as needed, replaces the plain colour in final and interlace modes. Arabeske always attempts to re-scale it as little as possible, depending on the respective resolutions of the texture image and of the output pattern.

The image chosen here dos not properly fill the plane: the seam is clearly visible in the horizontal middle of the picture. This can be fixed in an external image software like Gimp, Photoshop or the like. This gives the image shown at the beginning of this chapter.