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Material presets

arno

arno

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Hi all,

I am working on a new feature at the moment, the feature to have material presets or templates. Basically this is a few to make sure certain parameters of your material are set to the values you defined.

I am still searching for the best way to let the user define such templates. Do you have any ideas on that?

One idea I have is that you take an existing material and then say which parameters should become the template.

Another question, do you expect that you will change templates often? Or is it more like define once and then use?
 
Hi,

I think after a night sleep I got an idea for the template editor form. I'll post a screenshot later on.
 
I think the most used material is the concrete with glass windows.
The preset material should include this and let user choose the specular map.
 
There are only a few material trypes that users use.

Rather than having inbuilt material types, I would certainly favour being able to use existing materials as templates, and then being able to give these a name that means something to the user.

In all likelihood, I will still create and organise the textures within Max (or gMax) but this would be the way I would be inclined to work.

ModelconverterX is most useful (to me) for checking the compiled mdl for performance issues (drawcalls, vertices/material, and whether it looks as expected)
 
Hi,

Material templates are not materials including textures. It is the option as suggestion before to have a function to set the material properties according to some template. So to ensure they all have the same settings.

So I guess a good template would be for chrome or metallic looks, for materials with a specular texture, etc.
 
Hello

I can only think of 3 catagory types for templates,.. as mentioned before, chrome/metals and glass,... of course there also could be a water reflection template.

Considering ideas or forms,... and the use of,.... I guess it would be easier if we had a visual aid while constructing a template. Such as a box or "tea pot", as the sdk manual uses.

Arno, maybe it would be easier for us to see what you have in mind and go from there, specifically in terms of the form look and use of?
 
Hi,

Development went quicker than in thought, so I put the new material editor, with the material presets (or templates) in the development release already. So you can try it yourself already.

This thread contains the link to a video tutorial demonstrating the new functionality, including the material templates.
 
I think the material preset implies two conditions here:
1. The suggested setting for certain materials such as metal, chrome, concrete aspahlt, glass etc.
2. The user preset material. User can set up their materials the way they like and keep them to apply with other object in the same property. So the user does not need to set up all the setting individually. If there are any mistake in the setting, it might cause another drawcall.

I used to convert a model in FS9 to FSX and each object I needed to set up material for each one. If I can save those material and reuse it with other objects, it would be perfect.
 
Hi,

Yes, that's the idea. To store changes you want to apply to multiple materials in the template (or recipe) and then just apply when you need them.
 
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