ArahDrape
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The greatest disadvantage of a weaver is low level of contact with the final customers. There are just too many middlemans in this business. ArahDrape was developed to help weavers in making a better presentation of their fabrics. By using this software, you will be able to show the looks of your fabric on a shirt, tie, jacket, sofa, tablecloth, bedlinen or whatever the final use of your fabrics may be. You will be able to present the whole collection of your fabrics, and answer many mix and match "What if?" questions at almost zero cost. What if we rotate this pattern by 45 degrees? Can you make it 20% smaller? You will have the picture to answer the question in no time.
... more information Shirting without a tailor
What is the biggest curse of a weaver? Opinions will vary on this issue, but poor contact with the final customers is definitely one of them. There are just too many middlemans in this business. We can not address the surprisingly low percentage of the fabric cost in the final product. But we can help the weaver in making a better presentation of her fabric used in a finished product. Using ArahDrape, you will be able to show the looks of your fabric on a shirt, tie, jacket, sofa, tablecloth, bedlinen or whatever the final use of your fabrics may be. You will be able to present the whole collection of your fabrics, and answer many mix and match "What if?" questions at almost zero cost. What if we rotate this pattern by 45 degrees? Can you make it 20% smaller? You will have the picture to answer the question in the time it takes to ask it. In this tutorial, we will present the whole procedure of making your own drape models from zero; in a real-life presentation you will have the models already prepared, so you will just apply the different fabric textures from your current collection. Open ArahDrape by clicking on its icon on the desktop. You will need a picture of the model or the product, with fabric areas in white or in single color. We want to keep the shades and ambient of the original photo, and just replace the fabric. If the model will already have the fabric with a pattern, we will not be able to remove the pattern and insert a new one, while keeping the shades of the original image. You can scan the picture, or make a photo with a digital camera, and transfer the image into the computer. Then select Images > Load Image.... First you have to draw limitation vectors around each region. Region is an area within the image, where you want to overlay a fabric texture, or a hole within a fabric. Choose Regions > New > Vectors, or simply click on the icon
The default color of the active region is blue, while the color of unselected regions is red. The colors of lines can be changed in Files > Preferences.... On many occasions, the limits of one region will border to another region. You will need to draw the points of your new region on the same point as the border regions, otherwise they will not join correctly and some pixels will "shine" through the borders. This can be quite dull and time consuming task. We will show you a trick, which will allow the program to automatically draw the area border vectors along the existing area. To draw another region, click the Now press the space bar, and program will automatically draw new vectors along the common vectors between the last two points. Obviously, there must be a connected path of vectors of other areas from one point to the other, or the program will not know what to do. Program will always choose the shortest connected path - it is a genuine shortcut! You must draw region borders for all areas - including the holes in regions, like the buttons. Once you have drawn all the borders, you will be ready to load the texture, which you want to drape over the area. Texture can be any picture in a supported graphical format (PNG, TIFF, GIF, JPEG). It will probably be in repeat, but you may also use texture pictures, which do not repeat themselves. If you scan in the fabric picture, you will probably spend some time putting it in repeat. The easiest way to make a fabric texture is to save a fabric simulation from ArahWeave. This way you can be sure that the image will be in repeat. The following screen shot shows the window for saving fabric textures in ArahWeave. You call this function in ArahWeave if you click on Files > Save fabric texture... The options are pretty straight forward:
We can now return to ArahDrape. If you wish, you can keep ArahWeave open and create textures on the fly, as you need them. The textures can be loaded into ArahDrape using a normal from file selection box by Textures > Load texture.... But probably you prefer browsing texture icons in a graphical way, so you can use Textures > Browse.... Browse window is shown on the following picture. It has some options like Repeat, Size, Date... their meaning is quite obvious, do not be afraid to try them out. You can also rename the file, if you click on filename, or delete it, if you select it and hit [Del] button. If you want to get a better view of the texture, click on it with the right mouse button, and it will open in full screen mode. You can use + and - on the keyboard to zoom in, or [PgUp] or [PgDown] to load the next or previous image. Click right mouse button again to close the full screen image preview. Double click with mouse to the desired texture to load it into ArahDrape. It will be displayed on the icon bar on the right below the icons. If you want to unload the texture from the program, you can either click on it and load a different texture in its place, or hit [Del] on the keyboard to get rid of it. This will not delete the texture file, it will just remove it from ArahDrape. We are at at the point where we need to specify the textures to our areas, so you must change the View mode from Regions to Regions and Drape in the toplevel menu. Each region can be be any of three types:
Every region can have one of two states - flat Click on If you have specified the the zoom level and shades for one region, you can use right mouse button to copy it to all the other regions, which contain have the same texture. You should set the region type to hole for buttons and labels. If you want to get a more realistic view of the final image without the region borders, select View > Drape. We have all the nice shades, but the image still looks somewhat flat. Why? It looks unnatural, because the newly applied textures do not follow the shape of the original model. We must specify the geometric distortions in the fabric caused by perspective view, creases or simply the 3D volume of the product. To accomplish this ambitious goal, we will use the grid tool. You can get the Grid window, if you click on icon Use Simple when you have an easy perspective mapping, like a carpet on the floor. You will have a rectangle, which you should distort into a trapezoid which matches the desired geometry of the mapping. And use Complex fro anything more complicated. 
Once you finish setting the grid for one region, close Grid window, click select next region by left mouse button to select it, and open Grid window again. You can also click on Show grid in Grid window, to see which grid will be used in the mapping. You also can increase the grid Density; this will make smaller rectangles in the mapping. In most cases, default grid density will do just fine. Adding, deleting, and moving grid vector points works same as on region vectors: to add a point into an existing vector, just press the middle mouse button on the vector; to delete a point press the middle mouse button at the point. If you want to delete the whole vector, point the mouse cursor at one of the points of that vector, press a right button, and choose Delete vector. The start of fabric texture within a region is not independent from the other regions. On a normal shirt, the fabric on the pocket needs to be aligned with the body. To match the starting offset of two neighboring regions, click anywhere on the region with left mouse button and drag the texture to the desired position. Program will interactively move the texture offset as you will move the mouse. You should not forget to save your work at the end, use Files > Save project...; type the filename in the and in the file selection box. The extension As you have seen, making a good drape model requires some work, so we want to use the same model many times with different texture. You can load other fabric textures by clicking on Textures > Browse... If your drape model contains many regions, like on the shirt form our example, you will quickly become tired from clicking on regions with right mouse button to apply a different texture. One would like to copy the new fabric texture to all regions, which have currently the same texture. To achieve this, click on group icon Textures can also be rotated. The default center of rotation is at the first border point of the region, but can be moved to the desired place by double clicking the left mouse button. The current position of the center of rotation is marked by a small circle. The shirt on the lower picture has it at the middle of the right pocket. You can set the angle of rotation pressing by left and right arrow key on the keyboard, or by entering a value in Rotate field in the right bottom corner of the main ArahDrape window.
As always, we are doing this to impress our potential customers, or to help them choosing between the different variations of our products. So we need to find a good way of showing our draped images to them. One way is to invite them in front of the computer, and insert the textures from your collection as you talk to them. This will probably be the most effective way, since it will also involve the customer. If such a presentation is not possible, you can also print the drape simulation from Files > Print picture.... If you want to send the picture by e-mail to the customer, or prepare pictures for publishing on the web like in our drape gallery, you can save just the drape image using Files > Save image as... In this tutorial, we have used a white shirt from Labod and fabrics from Tekstina and Arazzo. List of accelerator keys in ArahDrape: ZOOM VIEW MODE SET REGION TYPE b : browse textures
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and it will change into 
. This icon indicates that you are in region drawing mode. You can draw the starting point by clicking on the left mouse button. Move the mouse to a new point and make a left mouse button click ... and so on until you come to the starting position. There are user friendly functions for editing regions:
or shaded 
. First select a region, which you want to change, and then click on the icon on the top right angle to change its state. Flat region will have the whole area replaced with a single color, repeat of fabric texture, or image background. Shaded region, on the other hand, will be a sum of background image shades and the specified color or fabric texture. If you are draping based on a photo, you will prefer to have it shaded, while flat might be more appropriate for quick fashion sketches. 
or select menu Regions > Grid.... Do not forget to click on the desired region first - you can set the grid for only one region at the time. There are two different grid types:
in the toolbar. It will change itself to 
, so that you know that your are in "group" mode. From now on, you can use a single click (right mouse button) to copy texture to all regions with the same texture. You can then disable the group to change the region type individually, if you wish. For example, you can make the shirt collar and wristband white, if you change their region type from texture 
