material zones

SteveM17

I imported a prop that's an OBJ into DS. But there are no colours or textures, it just a whitish/grey colur, which means altering it in DS. Changing the colours/textures is easy enough, but there's a long list of them and they don't hve names, just Material 1, material 2 and so on. If they had names such as Sail 1 and Decking 1 and so on, it would be much faster. Is there a way of clicking on bits of the prop to find out the material number it corresponds to?

JimmyC_2009

Yes, use the Surface Selection Tool (Alt+Shift+M) from the toolbar at the top, or from the Tools menu.

The different surfaces will light up yellow as you hover over them, have the Surfaces pane open, and when you click on one of the yellowed areas, the appropriate surface will be selected automatically in the Surfaces pane.

It is a very handy tool at times.

SteveM17

Thanks JimmyC, this will save me a LOT of time!

kitakoredaz

anduuuu,,,:roll:

if you right click the surface on obj in 3d view, with surface Selection tool,
you can see many option, which can help us to selece what we hope only -^^ b
eg you can select surfaces by color, by diffuse color map etc, which have samje value,,

surface Selection tool and surface tab editor conbination work very well.

JimmyC_2009

Thanks kitakoredaz.

I had forgotten about that, makes it even more useful.

SteveM17

Thanks for the advice guys. This will certainly help me when using freebie OBJ's that often don't label the zones specifically. Cheers!

mjc1016

Also if you have the obj, mtl and the texture files in the same folder it's more likely to import textured.

You need to make sure that in the import dialog 'Read surfaces' and 'Read Material Library' are checked...if one of them isn't, it doesn't matter where the mtl and texture files are.

You can also open the mtl file in a text editor and make sure that it is 'path neutral'...meaning that there are no hard coded paths to the texture files like C:\some directory\some user\texture folder\texture.jpg. If there is, edit the file to remove all but the texture name...then make sure the obj, mtl and texture files ARE TOGETHER. Of course you could create that file path and place the textures there...

SteveM17

mjc1016 said:

Also if you have the obj, mtl and the texture files in the same folder it's more likely to import textured.

You need to make sure that in the import dialog 'Read surfaces' and 'Read Material Library' are checked...if one of them isn't, it doesn't matter where the mtl and texture files are.

You can also open the mtl file in a text editor and make sure that it is 'path neutral'...meaning that there are no hard coded paths to the texture files like C:\some directory\some user\texture folder\texture.jpg. If there is, edit the file to remove all but the texture name...then make sure the obj, mtl and texture files ARE TOGETHER. Of course you could create that file path and place the textures there...

I've never paid much attention to the import dialogue, I'll do so in future though.
I've started using the surface selection tool, and it works as you guys said, but the larger zones seem a little "flat" or stretched. My understanding is that this is something to do with Bump map/strength, but I have never used these functions before. Is there a simple way to use them? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

JimmyC_2009

If you have a bump map loaded, an easy way would be to change the Bump Strength to zero, or the map to 'None', and see if it makes any difference. Stretching of textures is generally caused by the UV Mapping.

When you have the surface area selected, change the camera view to 'UV View', and that should show you what the UV Map looks like.

SteveM17

JimmyC_2009 said:

If you have a bump map loaded, an easy way would be to change the Bump Strength to zero, or the map to 'None', and see if it makes any difference. Stretching of textures is generally caused by the UV Mapping.

When you have the surface area selected, change the camera view to 'UV View', and that should show you what the UV Map looks like.

What if there isn't a bump map? Would loading one help? I don't know anything about them really.

Or UV maps either, come to think of it.

JimmyC_2009

I’ve started using the surface selection tool, and it works as you guys said, but the larger zones seem a little “flat” or stretched. My understanding is that this is something to do with Bump map/strength, but I have never used these functions before. Is there a simple way to use them? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

I am not sure what you are seeing here? Is it when you apply a texture that you think the mats look stretched?

If there is no bump map loaded, then there is no bump applied, so that is not it.

The UV Map provides a template for creating your own textures, and is all or part of the object flattened out in a 2D view so that you can paint on it in an app like Photoshop or Gimp, apply that to the Duffuse channel, and it changes the material on the object. If you apply a material as say a JPEG image to an object, and the object is not UV Mapped, then it will almost certainly not fit correctly. The process of UV Mapping tells the program (DS4P) where to put the texture so that it lines up with the model.

SteveM17

Here is a picture of a sailing ship OBJ I put in DS4. The texture on the deck loks stretched. Under Bump map it just says "choose map" and under UV it says default.

Richard Haseltine

You will get alternatives for the UV mapping only if the maker provided one, and that requires the item be in DS native format. What you may be able to do is use the tiling setting to repeat the texture, but that will work only if the texture is uniform across its extent - if there are different wood patterns for different parts on the same template then the repeated image will be very odd.