Interface description

Common border allows you to control all four sides by a single parameter. If it’s off you can control sides separately.

Border controls how many cut texture to construct borders part. For example, 20% grab 40% of texture whole width to create borders and left 60% as a central part.

You can get size of some container, just like in “TextBG” standard plugin.

Magnifier corrects size to shrink or stretch this texture. E.g. that way you can increase/decrease shadow size.

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Theory

Imagine, you need to create nice looking shadows for a plane. You are just creating a texture faking shadows effect. If you know the size in advance — all is ok. But what to do if you are creating some customizable effect? You can't know what size the rectangle will have. 9 part texture rescue you!

1. Lets start from painting square texture of shadow effect.

2. Understand how to slice it.

Center is too big. Actually it can be 1x1 pixel. I leave this non optimal version for clarity.

3. How it stretches?

Simple one rectangle take this result:

If we are applied "9 part" concept, we can get this:

We just change size of only three parts. It's the central row.

This way you can create a glow, shadow and frame effects, etc:

Practice

I wrote the script to provide solution "9 part texture" in vizrt.

How to use it:

1. Drop script to some container
2. Click "Create base planes" for creating nine sub-containers.
3. Drop texture to all nine sub-containers.
4. Set "Source of size", position...
5. Set "Border" parameter correspondingly to texture style:

There is an issue when a central row or column is too small. This is texture filtering. The issue can be solved by setup maximum Anisotropic Filter on all nine textures:

Try it yourself

I've prepared some textures for you ;)

I use white color for easy changing color in vizrt. Just add a material ;) If you want black color on a shadow, just add black material on the master container:

Glow/shadow

Frames