046) Adding a texture to irregular-shaped slabs

The purpose of this tutorial is to assign an irregular-shaped texture to a 3D slab of the same shape. There are two ways to do this; the first method requires an optional add-on to ArchiCAD called ArchiFacade and the second method (which is longer) is the one we will explain here.

1. Place the texture in a folder so we can later load this folder as an active library later. The texture should be saved as TIFF, JPEG or PNG.
   
   
   
   
2. Start ArchiCAD and then select the "Library Manager" command from the "File" menu. When the "Library Manager" dialog box appears, add the folder you've placed the map into to your active libraries.
   
   
   
   
3. Use the "Figure" tool to place the map into the floor plan window but before placing it, adjust the size of the map.
   
   
   
   
4. Using the "Slab" tool, trace the outlines of the map.
   
   
   
   
5. Using the "Line" draw the rectangle that contains the map. Also draw a slab at the lower left corner of the rectangle.
   
   
   
   
6. Create a new material that uses the map as a texture. For the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the texture, use the dimensions of the rectangle we've created in the previous step.
   
   
   
   
7. Select the slab and assign the new material to the top surface.
   
   
   
   
8. The map will appear on the slab but will not be aligned properly. In some cases the texture will appear upside down. In this case go back to step 6 and set the angle of the texture to 180 degrees.
   
   
   
   
9. To align the texture to the slab, select the slab in the 3D Window and then select the "Design > Align 3D Texture > Set Origin.." command.
   
   
   
   
10. Click on the slab that we've created at the bottom left corner of the rectangle
    
    
    
    
11. Now the texture will be properly aligned. Now delete the rectangular slab as we don't need it anymore.
    
    
    
    
12. The next step is to save the slab as an object to ensure that the texture will always be aligned to the slab. To do that, select "File > Libraries and Objects > Save 3D Model as..." command.
    
    
    
    
13. Make sure that you save the object as a "Non-editable binary".
    
    
    
    
14. Now this object can be placed in any location and the texture will always be properly aligned to the slab.
    
    

In a different tutorial we will achieve the same result using the ArchiFacade add-on.