Itoo Software Forum

Forest Pack => Forest Pro (*) => Topic started by: SD8355 on July 27, 2016, 04:40:02 PM

Title: Material struggle
Post by: SD8355 on July 27, 2016, 04:40:02 PM
Sorry, but I don't understand how this works (with custom objects).

I've made a library of 7 customs rocks, all of them have a proper material assigned to it in the source scene (redshift renderer), I even named by numbering them, and assigned an id to each rock, corresponding to the name number, then when I add them in the forest object list, I do it in order so I can have multi-sub material id's matching exactly the order/name/number of each object.

Even after doing all that careful organized procedure, forest pack seems to assign the materials randomly to the rocks, I can notice it because of the uv layout differing from one another (if it's not the good material, the uv's don't match). And sometimes, it even renders a part of the rocks with the id color (?!).

At the end, I have no control over the material of my rocks, even considering the fact that I setup all that beforehand.

Can someone help me understand how do I get control of that (ps: I already read the doc and some posts about material assignment and id, etc).


Edit:
Even when I choose only one custom object in the FP object list, it can't render correctly the first time, but it renders the color id only. So pick the material into material editor, a multi-sub object material is assigned to it, 1 is the redshift original material (why doesn't it render?), and 2 being the id color. Even if I switch the two materials (redshift being 2 and id being 1), it refuses to render the redshift material and continues to render the id color (what is going on?). If I clear the material and assign the redshift mat alone, again, id color renders (what?, it's not even assigned).
The only way for me here is to assign the redshift material to both of the multi-sub slots, and finally it renders.

I couldn't have been more organized and straight in the preparation of my custom objects and library, so please, tell me how your software works, and is it so complicated to have custom objects and libraries working with it?

Thank you again, no offense intended of course.
Title: Re: Material struggle
Post by: Paul Roberts on July 27, 2016, 05:24:24 PM
Hi,

We have been running some tests here with Redshift and I can confirm that there is an issue with the Consolidate material feature when using this renderer. Forest Pack support for this renderer was carried out by Redshift themselves (using our API) and it seems there may be an error in the implementation, we're contacting Redshift to try to get this resolved asap.

In the meantime you can get around this issue by manually building a single multi-sub object material that works for all your rock objects. To do this you will need to consolidate your rock materials into a single Multi-sub object material and then reasign the IDs on the geometry to match.

Until this feature is fixed you might find this quick tip useful. If you don't want to create a multi-sub object shader and re-assign IDs manually, an easy way to consolidate materials is as follows:

-    Attach all the objects into a single mesh. Use the default options, so Max creates the multi-sub object.
-    Detach each object back into separate objects.
-    Re-adjust the pivots if necessary.

You may find there are some scripts that can make a multi-sub object for you. For example I use RappaTools which has a Multi-Material from Selection option. This creates a multi-sub object material and automatically re-assigns the IDs. I believe the free version (http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/rappatools) may have the same functionality, but we haven't tried it

I hope that helps, please let me know if you have any further questions.

Many Thanks,

Paul
Title: Re: Material struggle
Post by: SD8355 on July 27, 2016, 05:29:41 PM
Thank you for your support :)