Step 4. Add some carpet

Carpet is a tricky thing to model because it has so many individual fibres. The best way of creating a carpet in SkIndigo is to use what is called a displacement map.

Start by drawing a rectangle on the floor and using push/pull to make it into a box of 3cm height. Then use the select tool Edit → Make Group.

When we add a displacement map, it will make our "carpet box" very bumpy, which means the edges of the box won't line up. To prevent gaps appearing, right click on the carpet and select Soften / Smooth Edges, choose a value of 90 degrees between normals and press enter.


Our carpet box ready to texture map.

Next, using the paintbrush tool, select the Carpets and Textiles set and the Carpet_Plush_Charcoal texture. Apply it to the carpet box. Right click on the carpet box and choose SkIndigo → Edit [Carpet_Plush_Charcoal]. The SkIndigo Material Editor will open:


SketchUp material editor

Note that the Albedo channel (which means the color of the material) is already set to the SketchUp carpet texture.

Now, change the displacement map to "SketchUp" which will tell SkIndigo to use the current SketchUp texture as the displacement map. Then change the value to 0.05 which will give a maximum displacement of 0.05 meters where the map pixel value is pure white. Be sure to enable displacement mapping by clicking on the checkbox.

Press Plugins → Skindigo → Render Scene, you may note that the carpet looks all triangulated and bumpy. You may need to increase the "detail" of the carpet by adding more subdivisions. Right-click the group and, from the Edit Active Mesh dialog, increase Max Subdivisions to at least 9. Also, uncheck the box for "View Dependent". This setting will decrease the amount of subdivision for geometry that is farther away from the camera, but we'll leave this optimisation for now.

Render the scene again.


Derrick admires his nice grey carpet.