Hi all,

I ran into some problems with some of the newer Carrara features, and I kind of hit the wall trying to solve them. There are many experienced Carrara artists here, so I hope that you could offer me some helpful hints.

Topic 1: Plant Editor: In C8 we have an ability to add multiple leaf meshes -- great addition. And It can work wonders too,  but: I have a "leaf" mesh which has 2 shading domains: the "stem" and the "leaf" itself. I use different shaders or I use Parametric Mapping to combine my 2 shaders into one, I save my leaf, I add it to my plant. But once I add it to my plant, the new leaf shading domain is added as a shading domain of the plant, and any shading domains of the leaf itself are completely disregarded.

Questions:

--Is there a way to have the leaf shading domains respected?

--If not, what are my alternatives?

Topic 2: UV Mapping: Again, I have a mesh with multiple shading domains. The mesh is already UV mapped so that the whole mesh fits on a single map. I did not UV Map it initially, but I need to change the mapping. In the UV editor all of my shading domains are shown all the time. And if parts of the mesh are connects (as per old  UV map) and I try to move wheere they are on the UV map, the connection gets dragged along. Even when I add seams or separate the parts I try to move into a new shading domain.

Questions:

--Is there a way to work on a single shading domain at a time? (For example, unfold it to a different model than the other shading domains?)

--What can I do to separate a portion of the map and move it away from the other verices on the map without dragging the connection? (preferably without breaking the mesh itself)

I hope I am explaining it all clearly enough. If not, I'd be happy to clarify.

Thank you all in advance.

1 - Carrara support many leaves now, but everyone only can have 1 shadedomain... I already reported s a feature request. The alternative is use UVMap so you can use a texture in only one shade domain.

2 - Select the polys or shade domain that you want to work with only and in the tab Operations (inside UV editor) you can hit the Detach Polygons button to separete this island form the others.

GKDantas, thank you!

Could you point me to the feature request you've placed for the plants? I'd like to add my support. It would be great to have the shading domains preserved.

Detaching polygons only worked when I had just the shading domain of interest showing, for some reason. If I had all domains shown and tried detaching the polygons, they still moved with the connected points. Strange behavior. Is that a bug, or is it meant to be that way for some reason? Also, it could be just my machine.

If you think it's a bug and if you could verify it too, please let me know and I can file a bug report about it.

Again, thank you very much for the help! I greatly appreciate it. You have saved me so much time and frustration!

**
**

I did a test hiding a surface and works, the problem is that I cant select nothing from the shade domain hidden. Dont know if is what you tried too.

The bug report is this one:

https://bugs.daz3d.com/view.php?id=35480

The bug report must be private or locked. I cannot see it from my account.

And with the surfaces, my problem occurs when you DON'T hide surfaces:

When all surfaces are shown ("Show All" checkbox in the Display section of the UV Map editor) detaching polygons does not appear to take effect and the nearest points are still connected when the "detached" selection is moved.

Can you see this behavior? (I'm using Carrra 8.1.97)

I nee dto open another bugtrack to this problem... Here is a video that I did to show how I work with detach polygons:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4wE9GD9ktw

Hmmm. Thank you . It looks like it works as it should. And when I try it on a different model it works well too... Strange. But good thing it works. Thank you again for your help!