How to prepare wallcovering swatches for rendering

What to upload

A swatch of the wallcovering in the Swatch slot, showing the printed pattern flat and whole. Skip Shoot repeats it into a tile and papers the wall with it: in Studio, one wall of each scene, which you can change; in Editorial, the room's walls from baseboard to ceiling.

Selling paint? Paint isn't uploaded as an image: you enter its hex code. Studio repaints the walls, ceiling or cabinets of any room you've uploaded or made, one render a color, and Editorial can paint a scene too, or set the wall color when you make the room.

The ideal swatch

Paper curls and vinyl shines, so the two things to fight are a bent sample and a bright reflection.

• Flat: weigh the corners down outside the frame.
• Straight on, so the pattern doesn't narrow toward the far edge.
• At least one full repeat. For a large-scale print, step back until a whole repeat fits.
• Light from the side, angled away from the lens, so metallic inks and vinyl don't flare.
• True color: no filter, and white balance set to the light you're using.
• Filling the frame, with no border or table showing.

Check the repeat tile

When you save, Skip Shoot crops in from the edges of the swatch and repeats the middle in a grid, three by three unless you choose otherwise. That repeat tile, not the swatch on its own, is what renders read, so whatever the tile looks like is what you get. The tile is built from an uploaded swatch file: a swatch given only as a link renders from the plain swatch, with no tile, so upload the file.

• Open the product again after saving: the Repeat tile preview shows what renders will use.
• Visible seams, a grid or a bright cross where the copies meet mean the swatch won't tile cleanly. Try 2 × 2, which repeats least, or take the swatch again, flatter.
• If the swatch is already a wide, flat shot with several repeats in it, choose 2 × 2, so the pattern isn't shrunk further than the picture already shrinks it.

Measurements

The repeat is usually printed on the roll label or the spec sheet, and it is the number that matters.

• Pattern repeat, in inches. Renders draw the pattern at that real size and let the wall's edges cut it.
• No repeat? Enter the width and height of one motif. Left blank, a motif is drawn 9 by 5 inches.
• Depth isn't used for wallcoverings.
• Check What is it? reads Wallcovering. The line under it says how the product will render.

Before you save

Check each swatch:

• Flat and straight on.
• A full repeat in frame.
• No glare from ink or vinyl.
• True color, no filters.
• Pattern repeat entered.
• JPEG, PNG or WebP, 4.5 MB or less.