Importing fabric patterns

[Kilgore Trout]

Yes, you can use your own custom materials in all Home Designer products, whether you make them yourself or download them from one of the many available web sites. There are only a few things that you need to do to make them work. The specific instructions will vary depending on whether you are using one of the version 6 products or one of the version 7 products.

1. You need to start with a texture file that is in one of the allowed formats, such as JPG. Any photo edit program should be able to save a file as a JPG file.

2. You need to copy the file into a place where you can find it such as a folder under the Textures folder that is installed with the program.

3. You need to make a new material and set the material to use the texture you want. You need to make sure to set the width to something that will look right. The width is the size of the area that the material is going to get mapped onto. If your area is set to 20" then your texture will get mapped onto a 20"x20" square surface and repeat every 20".

4. You should make sure that your texture is not too big or too small. Most of the textures that ship with the program are either 128x128 or 256x256 pixels. Square apparently works better but I don't think it has to be square to work.

5. You should make sure that your texture "tiles" seamlessly. This is the hardest part. If you have a pattern such as a fabric and the pattern does not match up nicely where the texture gets repeated it will not look good. Some photo editing programs will have tools to make textures tile but this is still the part that takes the most work. If you have a simple pattern (like one of the woven fabrics that is already in the program), this is easy but if you have a complicated pattern, this can be difficult to get something that will look good.

You should take a look at the fabrics that are in the texture folder. This should give you a good idea of how you can create your own.