Vector wood textures should be good for creating parts to be printed on colored paper. The wide variety of pixel-based textures available seem to be less suitable, since the outcome of printing an image on colored paper is unpredictable. Vector wood patterns on the other hand can be constructed so as to leave the areas between the pattern lines transparent, letting the paper color dominate.
Here is an experiment with vector wood textures on a real example. This is a stab and one of its ribs in 1/16 scale, with two simple vector wood patterns applied, one for the rib type of parts (solid wood), and one suitable for ply covering parts:
How the rib was made:
The original wood texture was reduced to 1/16 scale ≈ 6 percent. It was then stripped of its yellow background color, and the pattern proper elongated to fit the rib.
Clipping paths of the stab & elevator ribs were applied to the pattern, and most of the protruding (now invisible, but still irritating) paths cleaned up.
The clipping path patterns were inserted above the basic yellow color (simulating the paper color), but below the holes (white) to be drilled.
A copy of this was made with the pattern in 50 percent grey, @ 50 percent opacity. (Disregard the small blue lines; they are paths accidentally selected when making the screenshot.)
Finally the two versions are shown inserted into the original part from the drawing. Note that parts to be cut out will be without the base yellow. The last two examples show what they might look like when printed on yellowish paper.
How the stab ply cover was made:
For the stab a larger wood pattern was used, scaled to 20 percent in order to replicate a possible ply pattern. The pattern was then elongated to enable making a clipping mask from half the stab leading edge ply cover.
The texture used here was different, in that it does not consist of one pattern overlaid on a base color, but in fact two separate patterns. This is good, since then you can try both patterns. I chose to work with the lighter pattern, but recolored it darker. Two result are shown in the top view of the stab - one colored version, and on 50 percent grey, @ 30 percent opacity.
Note that the basic color here, light brown, was chosen to replicate some paper color closer to aircraft birch plywood.
Reflections:
There is much room for experimenting with just these two simple textures, which I find most adequate. You can try them at various scales, various elongations and various colors in different opacities as overlays to be printed of the colored paper of your choice. I will probably use the colored versions in both cases.
You may ask why use vector patterns when there is such a plethora of very good pixel-based textures to be had? I agree that for printing on white paper, these are much more suitable and easier to work with, and I have had great pleasure in creating my own little library of such textures.
The idea here, however, was to develop a method of working with colored paper. This would not be suitable for the ordinary, fully built-up models, which we are used to. But I thought it would be extremely useful for developing uncovered, framework, models of antique aicraft. In such models you would have to handle myriads of small details, like the rib and stab leading edge parts seen here.
Printing these details on colored paper would greatly simplify the assembly work, I thought, eliminating the need for edge coloring, and enabling sanding of parts without losing edge colors.
If you want to explore the possibilities I enclose the two textures used in this experiment in both .ai and .eps format, plus the Illustrator drawing. (An .eps version of the drawing unfortunately turned out to be just a tad too large to be able to attach; a zipped pdf-version, however, managed to squeeze through...)
I should also say that this experiment originated in a thread posing a query for repeating textures (not vector). This post in that thread will give you the original source for the textures used here, and also some more zipped useful vector wood textures.
Leif
Here is an experiment with vector wood textures on a real example. This is a stab and one of its ribs in 1/16 scale, with two simple vector wood patterns applied, one for the rib type of parts (solid wood), and one suitable for ply covering parts:
How the rib was made:
The original wood texture was reduced to 1/16 scale ≈ 6 percent. It was then stripped of its yellow background color, and the pattern proper elongated to fit the rib.
Clipping paths of the stab & elevator ribs were applied to the pattern, and most of the protruding (now invisible, but still irritating) paths cleaned up.
The clipping path patterns were inserted above the basic yellow color (simulating the paper color), but below the holes (white) to be drilled.
A copy of this was made with the pattern in 50 percent grey, @ 50 percent opacity. (Disregard the small blue lines; they are paths accidentally selected when making the screenshot.)
Finally the two versions are shown inserted into the original part from the drawing. Note that parts to be cut out will be without the base yellow. The last two examples show what they might look like when printed on yellowish paper.
How the stab ply cover was made:
For the stab a larger wood pattern was used, scaled to 20 percent in order to replicate a possible ply pattern. The pattern was then elongated to enable making a clipping mask from half the stab leading edge ply cover.
The texture used here was different, in that it does not consist of one pattern overlaid on a base color, but in fact two separate patterns. This is good, since then you can try both patterns. I chose to work with the lighter pattern, but recolored it darker. Two result are shown in the top view of the stab - one colored version, and on 50 percent grey, @ 30 percent opacity.
Note that the basic color here, light brown, was chosen to replicate some paper color closer to aircraft birch plywood.
Reflections:
There is much room for experimenting with just these two simple textures, which I find most adequate. You can try them at various scales, various elongations and various colors in different opacities as overlays to be printed of the colored paper of your choice. I will probably use the colored versions in both cases.
You may ask why use vector patterns when there is such a plethora of very good pixel-based textures to be had? I agree that for printing on white paper, these are much more suitable and easier to work with, and I have had great pleasure in creating my own little library of such textures.
The idea here, however, was to develop a method of working with colored paper. This would not be suitable for the ordinary, fully built-up models, which we are used to. But I thought it would be extremely useful for developing uncovered, framework, models of antique aicraft. In such models you would have to handle myriads of small details, like the rib and stab leading edge parts seen here.
Printing these details on colored paper would greatly simplify the assembly work, I thought, eliminating the need for edge coloring, and enabling sanding of parts without losing edge colors.
If you want to explore the possibilities I enclose the two textures used in this experiment in both .ai and .eps format, plus the Illustrator drawing. (An .eps version of the drawing unfortunately turned out to be just a tad too large to be able to attach; a zipped pdf-version, however, managed to squeeze through...)
I should also say that this experiment originated in a thread posing a query for repeating textures (not vector). This post in that thread will give you the original source for the textures used here, and also some more zipped useful vector wood textures.
Leif
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