I make several MAT poses for my poser figures to change textures. Can this be done in Vue 7 complete? Basically a 1 click material to change a Vue vob textures. Thanks

You can either resave the objects with the new mat as adifferent vob, or save the material from the material editor.

Yes, but several materials change. I was hoping, and was told, there is a way to do this by saving all materials as a group maybe, and apply that to the vob to change all materials simultaneously. The person that told me didn't know how to do it, but is sure he heard there was a way.

Mazak

Mazak

Mazak

Quote - And here the final picture. But you must always save the complete object or scene to save the material. We need a tool where I can tweak more materials at once. Specular, bump, texture filter and so on. This is possible with python scrips only. I hope someone read this and create such an needed tool.

Mazak

Offtopic:

We (The Netherlands)  had such a ship.. Unfurtunatly it burned down today....  ;- (

http://www.zie.nl/videos/brand-verwoest-replica-voc-schip/m1dz3e7fxvt8

Ohh what a shocker! I hope no one was hurt. :ohmy:

Mazak

I tried doing somehting similar with macros, but...doens't work :/
(setting highlights bump strength)

Cheryrman
ICK! like the Cutty Sark burned down in London last year, omg...

Mazak it would help if you could be a bit more specific about what you'd like a script to do.  If its a simple script I might have time to look at it but without some specifics on what you want it to do (other than tweak material settings) I'd be shooting in the dark.

Thank you Impish, I know my English is weak and I can’t find always the right words.
What I want is a tool box where I can for example edit a couple materials at once.
Example:
The ship has 4-5 materials for the sails.

Material List:

Sail1
Sail2
Sail3
Sail4
Sail5

Now I want edit for all the Sail Textures and bump to Bicubic filter. Then I want all single sided and back-light to 60%. Bump strength 0.2 OK

Also a type of tool where I can save the material changes like a macro would be a good idea to. I hope this toolbox is possible with python.

Mazak

I'm pretty certain you can do what you want to do without a python script if you're using Vue 7.  You just need to use the "edit all materials" option when you've selected all the objects or materials you want to edit.  Its a great feature that was added in Vue 7 that seems to have not been noticed by lots of users.  I'll try to put a quick video tutorial together to show you how to do that.

No sadly that isn't correct. If I edit at once a few materials with different textures all materials change to the same texture. If I change on the sails the Bicubic filter all materials use the same texture after. So the "edit all materials" is very limited (or useless) :crying:

Mazak

Mazak,
I dont understand your specific problem either - I just used 'edit all materials' on an object that has 41 materials, I just changed the bump depth on all of them. Then I looked specifically at several of the material and they all still have their own texture map, the only thing that changed is the new pump depth.
However, the options with this are limited - you either edit one by one or all of them. You cant edit just all the sails but not the body (or at least I dont know how to do it)

I think the OP referred to something else, and I'm not sure this could be done with python.
The problem is :
lets say I  have a model of a house and it has 3 materials: walls, windows and roof.
I would like to have 2 sets of materials
A. Poor man's house: brick walls, transparent windows and red tiled roof
B. Nobility house: Marble walls, cathedral glass windows and gold roof.
I could save 2 different objects which have the same geometry but different material.
But it would be nicer if I could save just two sets of materials, and when I have the object I can apply  material set A or material set B. It will automatically apply the correct material to each of the 3 material groups.
This is analogous to what poser does - If you have a new texture for a character you dont have to apply a texture to each material group(ie head, limbs, etc) individually, you just apply the whole set.

So is that possible, Impish? I havnt discovered a way yet.

Mazak - I see what you mean about changing the texture maps' mapping that switches all the texture maps to be the same one.  I don't think its a bug but it strikes me as more of an oversight with "edit all materials".  I'll have a look see if I can write a script to let you switch the mappings of a set of materials in one go.

Ideally e-on (in the long term) might be able to revise edit all materials to make changing texture map mapping not affect the rest of the texture map settings. However it isn't completely useless - you can do all your bump map changes (and a lot of other changes in one go which is a lot more than you used to be able to do.

Artperl while what your asking for might be possible it would involve a fair amount of programming and at the moment I can't really persuade myself that I'm interested in it because I think there will be quite a lot of support required for people using it.  I think its probably a good candidate for a commecrial script as it will be of most use allowing a set of models to be combined with a set of textures.

If the object is set up right you can edit just the sails and not other parts of the object if either the sails are separate objects (or separate selectable objects in a group) or if the materials for the objects are distinct.  Simply select the materials / objects you want to edit and use edit all materials although Mazak has found a limitation on it.

Mazak

Yeah and if it could have a script that would set materials to:

bump -0.004 which is great for most objects wood stone etc (or -0.002 which is better for flesh and smoother items like metal)
Note those are negative values there.

and highlights to pure white and 10%/10% (or 20%/20%) that would work perfeclty well for most imports :)

Poser imports oftensrew up those settings dreadfully.

Ideally you'd also want, if there is no bump channel, to connect bump to the texture map. Nothing's perfectly smooth bar some metals etc.
:)

Mazak

P.S. did you know with the last update e-on changed the way bump maps worked! Now all old objects have bump-map in wrong direction. That cry for another script!

ick they changed them? :/
well, Vue is odd, it's always had greyscale images inverted, compared ot EVERY other package out there! lol

Vue 7.5 Infinite - Build 43360 The following is a list of bug fixes and improvements included in this update:

• Improved align tool(backup support).
• Fixed wrong planet shadowing, especially when atmosphere thickness isn't much smaller than planet radius.
• Fixed dynamic hair on Vista.
• Improved tiles for animation.
• Improved 3DConnexion support.
• Fixed wrong bump mapping onto UV-mapped mesh objects.
• Fixed preview color reset to green when adding an existing material.
• Various Ecosystem improvements.
• Various OpenGL improvements.
• Automatic output files renaming is enabled only for external rendering modes.

Mazak

This is a much needed feature in Vue.  SkinVue basically does this for Poser characters but it's not generalized to work like the Poser pz3 injector does.  What I think e-on needs to do is to create the concept of a material group or collection where you could save a collection of materials into a single file and use it like a Poser injector

A single mat file for multi grouped objects would be a good start! But we need also multi editing features where I can lock bitmap textures. Did you think this is possible with wxPython?

Mazak

Mazak wxPython is just a way of building a nice interface to any sort of python script.  The downside is that it takes longer to build the scripts if you use it (at least if you want them to be expandable and maintainable).  I've started taking a look at doing some of what you want (and using wxPython to put a nice interface on it) but its not going to happen instantly.  Life permitting I might have something next weekend but I make no promisses.

No worry, since I know some experts have a look at this problem I lean back wait and see.

Mazak

Well, edit all materials is working correctly in 7.5 :)

Dburdick
well, we can hope or you can build! ;)

I've posted a little script to my web site that will work through all the materials assigned to a set of selected objects and switch all the image maps in those materials to bicubic mapping.  Its more of a work in progress to start looking at what can be done rather than an all singing all dancing finished solution.

Anyway you can download it here:  Vue Switch Mapping Python Script

Thank you very much. It work like a charm :laugh: I tested on my Ship models all with 50+ materials. (Victory with 100 textures!) Vue Infinite 7.5 64Bit Vista. :thumbupboth:

Mazak

Mazak

Mazak

Mazak

I'll have a look at doing that.  Probably be Friday or the weekend before I get to it.

Thank you ! :biggrin:

Mazak

 Hi, I would like to make all materials in an object mixed materials, then apply a new material to the new material so I can kind of toon my poser people - clothes and all in once click by applying that toon incidence shader to the second material.  I could colour the toon shader white and I'm sure the tooning wouldn't look too bad.
Love esther

esther, Did you have an example of such material? I know Cel-shaded material only as single mat. Maybe this is possible with macro function of Vue?

Mazak

*Ester you asked about an Mixed Material, can you show what you exact mean? I know how to setup a simple toon very well. You show only the standard toon material I already know.

Mazak*

Mazak

 well if you apply that standard toon material to the original material in a half and half manner (ie 50% each) , then you still get to keep your original textures to some extent and of course it works better if you use the average colour of the original material to the toon material, but even if the toon material was just white, and you applied it this way to all the materials in a scene, I have a feeling it would still look okay.

aha

Mazak

 but currently there is no way to do this except to change the textures one by one.
Love esther

Going back to the image mapping and bump mapping requests take a look at my latest blog post which includes script to switch between the four different mapping modes for images in materials and to switch Vue’s Bump Mapping.

I'll have a think about the toon material mapping.  Something using an additional material layer might be easier to do than mixing and I'd prefer a better way of doing it as angle of incidence is ok for curves but rubbish on cubes.

 That would be cool having the toon material as an additional layer, but currently there is no way to apply this to multiple objects a once. 

estherau - I think that if someone can come up with the material for the layer I can come up with the script to add it and I think that would be easier to do than trying to do it as a mixed material.

Thank you Mark for the new scripts :thumbupboth:
I will try later now time for bed.

Mazak

 okay thanks impish, well if no one can come up with anything just try the toon layer as in my example above but white please.
Love esther

Here's a script that will add a new material layer to all the materials used on objects in a scene except mixed materials (I couldn't figure out a way to do them).  You'll need to supply the material and make a small edit on the script to set the material to use.  I've included instructions on how to change the one line that will need editing.

Add Material Layer Python Script for Vue

 ooh thankyou - this sounds really perfect!  I will give it a shot.
Love esther

 you've labelled the readme as the python script and viceversa hehe

 oh no you did it right - I just saw all the instructions and thought that must be the readme.
Now I don't look for the word "default" to replace do I?  (you must think I'm very silly).  I think it is the word "matname" that I have to replace with my own material name - right?
Love esther

 Hi there,
the script hasn't done anything yet.
I only changed this part

index=obj.Material (j).CountLayers()

            if obj.Material (j).GetSubLayer(index-1).Name()!=matcheckname and obj.Material (j).Type()==0:

                addlayer=obj.Material(j).AddLayer((index),CartoonWhite)

                if firstadd==0:

                    firstadd=1

                    matcheckname=obj.Material (j).GetSubLayer(index).Name()

And I have a material with that name in my effects folder inside my materials folder.
does it need a path to work maybe?
Love esther