I'm pretty new to Vue having just upgraded to Infinite. I was loading the Wood material onto the little boat that comes with it and it looked crap!

Now maybe it was me doing something wrong, maybe not!!

Anyway, What I want to know is: How do I put my own materials into Vue, I have some very good wood textures in jpg. form that I use in Poser but Vue seems to want a .mat file or something like that. Can I make those or just import the wood jpg and apply it to the boat like I would in Poser?

Sorry if it's a dumb question but I realized last night what a complex beast V5I is, so many parameters that I can play with!

Thanx in advance!

OK, easy. In the material editor, colours channel, check "mapped picture" instead of the default "procedural colors". Now there is a black square instaed of the mat sphere. Click the little arrow right at the bottom of the square, and browse for your texture on your HD. The little arrows on the bottom right are here if you want to rotate your image. The little black & white button on the top right makes your image a negative of the original ( sometimes useful for transmaps).

In the same colors tab, on the far right you can change the mapping mode of your image ( if you want to map a sphere, and the "automatic" mode, chosen by default by Vue, looks wrong, check "spherical", you get the idea.)

Now if you want to apply a texture map for bump, go to the bump tab, right click the sphere and choose edit, or silply control click. You land in the function editor. With the word "bump" higlighted, click the 6th icon from the bottom left, and your bump channel is connected to a texture map. Browse for the image you want to use as a bump map, or just connect the bump to the color channel if you don't have a bump map corresponding to your color texture map. Simply drag the little arrow that sticks from the word bump onto the color texture map.

It is very easy to create your own materials. Simply start with a default material and load the bitmap you want to have in the color tab of the material editor. You then can even use the same bitmap for bump in the bump tab or use a specific bump map there. If you have defined all the parameters, save the material simply to your disk and use it later then in other projects.

Many thanx bruno021, I shall go and have a play!

Oops cross post, thank you also Wabe!

Also , at the top of the Materials page, if you click on the  rounded bar at the top left of the page, labelled Basic material editor, it will take you to a page with 3 black boxes labelled Color, Bump, and Transparancy. There you can do the same things, but in addition ,on the Bump Panel you can, once activated, click on Use color map, and it will use your Color map as a Bump map. Very handy that is. Ditto for transparency if you need it. Mapping types are on the top right of that page in a Drop Down list.

all are correct... but it's trying get the scale and angle right using the UV map that is nooooo fun in vue.

I apply ecosystems (like the lush grass for instance) and then use the variable density map to help cut down on the polygons in the scene... but getting this thing to line up w/ my model's site is killing me!!!

Any tips out there on a quick way to preview the density map on the site and adjust it more easily say in a more interactive way?  thanks

There was a tute I read a while back by a Vue great...consarn it but I can't remember his name, on using B&W images to control ecosystem placement, one would imagine you could use greyscale maps the same way for control of densities....haven't tried it ...box too slow and low RAM, but it shoulsd work. Look up the tute, should be in the Backroom if anywhere...

thanks bobby... it does work well... I've done it several times... it's just that moving the density image w/in the 'border' of your terrain, and scaling the map to fit the terrain properly is difficult... actually I was applying the material w/ the density map to planes on a certain 'layer' in my .3ds file... I'm wondering if there's a quick way to get the map to scale itself to fit the extents of the planes on that layer.

Hmmm...I've had a bit of bother with that as well...any takers on that....?

Well being relatively new to Vue, you've all lost me completely!   

Not really an answer, but you will have a lot more trouble with using image maps to control Ecosystems if your scene is scaled too small in Vue - as i found out the hard way.

Had trees growing out of my road shoulders and curbs, etc. Finally someone pointed out that the scale of my whole scene was too small to get decent 'edge resolution' separating Ecosystem areas.

So then it's important to set the size requestor to actual size and type in sizes?...cool will try that........ if I don't lock it up that is...LOL

Not sure what the 'size requester' is. I just meant that your scene objects should have a 'normal' scale, such that a default figure looks natural.

For Ecosystem control bitmaps, better to have a scene where things are a bit large in scale, than small. And your Ecosystem bitmap has to have high enough resolution and large enough areas drawn on it. If  i remember (have not used an Ecosystem bitmap for many months) 1024 x 1024 was good for a model a few city blocks wide.

If you want to have some fun, forget grayscale maps and instead overlap 3 color maps in Photoshop as layers:
A red map, a green map and a blue map. Then setup the Vue 5i different Function Editor nodes with each using a separate RGB color channel.

Now you can superimpose 3 Ecosystem (or function) control maps (maybe even a 4th one that is grayscale) and use each to drive a different function, etc.

Kind of like function control map multiplexing.

 There was a post with a tutorial on this way back when Ecosystem first caem out and everybody was experimenting. Maybe something in the Backroom?

jc,

that sounds cool, but I'm having trouble enough just controlling the density with a grayscale .png... give me another year to get really comfy in VUE before I start messing w/ splitting the RGB channels to run multiple ecosystems... but I grasp the concept  :) cool idea.

The thing that I find weird is that Vue won't allow you to save materials directly into the materials library. Instead it asks you to save the file to disk, so you have to navigate to where the application stores its mat files and save it that way. Why there isn't an option to add a material directly into the Vue library system beats me.

Maybe because different people want to store their assets in different places and different ways (that is, mange them themselves)?

I agree an option to make it automatic would be good for those who don't prefer to do it themselves. Giving users choices is always best, IMO.

Personally i like to control file locations myself, so i don't mind a one-time process.

Ah, well, the thing is how inconsistent Vue is. If you try to load anything, say a material or a bitmap, Vue takes you right to the Vue library, and if your bitmaps are stored elsewhere (say, for example, in Poserruntimetextures) you have to find a teeny tiny button at the bottom of the window to get access to "load from disk". But when you want to save something, it takes you straight to the disk and not to the library. It's really not very well thought-out.