Another problem, and this one has me tearing my hair out in frustration. Say I have an imported model with two material zones on the one mesh. I am now texturing it in Vue. I go to some length in texturing the first material zone; now I want to have, say, a slightly shinier version on the second. The obvious procedure would be to copy the material from zone 1 to zone 2, and then edit zone 2. But as soon as I try to do this, Vue detects that it has two the same and deletes one of them! I've tried saving the material and loading it into the second zone, but the same thing happens. It's maddening! How can I edit a copy of a material? Ah, I've found a sort of fix, which is to create a dummy object, copy the material to that, edit it there, and drag it back to zone 2 and then delete the dummy object. This changes the name of zone 2 to that of zone 1 (!) and seems a very laborious way of doing something. There must be an easier way?

1st ?...why aren't your materials coming in on import???? 2nd ?...What type of "item" are you trying to import? 3rd...Up on top...click on the "display material summary"...in there you can edit each invididual material, they are listed by "part"...ie scale/color/masking/bumps etc. If I import a PZ3..all my mat's come in properly, no editting required. If I import a 3ds/obj/lwo which has NO textures....I click on the "body parts" over on the right & apply each one individually. I'm using Vue 4.2. Hope this helps :)

I know exactly what you're talking about, unfortunately the only way is the way that you are already doing it, Vue is trying to out-think you by assuming that you want to make that other zone the same material as the first zone (which in some instances you might want to do but not in this instance). Without making the material from scratch again or as dlk30341 suggested and edit the material in the object tree instead of using the material summary (which I'm assuming you're using since the object has different materials applied to the same mesh) the only way to do it is the way you're doing it, I've been doing the same thing for a while now and though irritating it's just learning to work around one of Vue's "Features".

Oh, you can also rename the second material to zone 2 once you've copied the material to that object to keep things straight.

Good idea. Yes, it's a case where one mesh has more than one material zone and it's a common case. Why aren't the materials coming in on import? Because they're procedural, natch.

Simple procedere. You create acube, spehre or whatever. Give that the material 1 and modify that. Then you simply pull this new icon in the material summary window to zone 2 material. Ta ta, nothing is lost. Then you can delete the in betweeen object. Other option. You break the object into pieces with the related command. The pieces are done by material zones. Then you have two independant objects and can do whatever you want to - materialwise. More easy questions like that? :-)))))

"You break the object into pieces with the related command." Ooh I didn't know about that. Thanks!