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I am new to Maxwell. I use Sketchup for modelling.. I make a lot of decking using balau wood width 90mm. What's the best way to make it happen in Maxwell?

My understanding is it would be best to make individual deckboards in SU and render them in Maxwell rather than render a whole area of decking using a texture of wood and resizing the texture so that the repeat is 90mm. Am I right?

But rendering each individual board, would that produce an artificial look where each board looks just like all the others?

Seems like there's a few ways to do this...
- Make individual boards. Individually tweak some of their geometries if you're really interested in non-uniformity
- Make individual boards. Rotate their texture mapping by +/- 1-2 degrees on some boards, or flip the mapping 180deg on certain boards
- Make one large deck, with one large texture + normal map. The Refl. 0 texture could be one large wood grain texture, and the normal map is where you could draw in the gaps between the boards. You can customize the textures to add inconsistencies in the grain and boards
- Make perhaps 3 large chunks, with three slightly different textures (if you want). Or just flip the texture mapping 180 degrees on some of them, to make the tiling less regular

Thanks Matthew. Sometimes I might have as many as 60 rows of deckboards in a model. I'm tempted to buy an Arroway Wood pack and try using them with a map. I've never made a map. Should I make a PNG that is 1024 x 1024 and draw an image in Photoshop that has black horizontal lines on a white b/g spaced evenly to use that as a map?

Yes that would work

One thing you should do is check out the Gallery board. Poke around or maybe do a search, and try to find good interior visualizations, and ask the author how they did their floors.

Good tip