Inventor^® Training

Make Inventor Models More Realistic with Custom Surface Textures

By David Melvin, PE, TEDCF Publishing

This short exercise will show you how to create two types of custom texture maps. The first type is a standard texture map that can be made from a picture of a real surface or it can be designed manually using image-editing software. The second type of texture map has transparent pixels.

First create the Bitmap image
Typically pictures are in jpg format. So if you want to create a surface texture from a picture of an actual surface, you’ll have to use software that can import jpg files and export bmp files. Most image-editing software can do this.

You can also create the surface texture manually if you’re artistically inclined. The only thing to keep in mind is that the pattern can repeat. That is the pattern can be tiled on the surface of your parts. So you should make sure the pattern looks good when tiled.

Scale the Bitmap image
When you create a standard surface texture, the size of the bitmap image should be 96 pixels high by 96 pixels wide.

A surface texture that has transparent pixels should be 97 pixels high by 97 pixels wide.

Follow these steps:

Setting Transparent Texture Maps
Transparent texture maps are 97 pixels square because…

We want the first sketch to…