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Author Topic: Need a little help with materials & matte shadow switching  (Read 2927 times)

jonavark

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Need a little help with materials & matte shadow switching
« on: April 23, 2012, 08:39:21 PM »
I have been using a blend material to switch my forest objects to matte/shadow and I am running into a little confusion.

I open the material editor and use the picker to get the forest_automaterial from the forest object.  Then I put that in a blend material and a matte shadow material as the other blend material. Usually this works but I am having trouble with FP switching back to the original materials and can't get the matte shadow material to show up. I switch off 'consolidate materials' and it seems to hold the blend material but regardless of blend settings I always get the textures.

What I am trying to do is set things up so I can script them for the multiple passes I usually do. I haven't been able to figure out the 'consolidate/reassign' materials things .. this method has worked ok..

Also.. in order to do this it seems I can not use XRef files.. is that the case?

Thanks!

iToo

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Re: Need a little help with materials & matte shadow switching
« Reply #1 on: April 23, 2012, 09:33:54 PM »

It is not safe to modify directly the automaterial, because Forest keeps internally references to the materials, that would create unexpected results if they are modified externally.

I suggest to modify directly the materials of the Geometry List (they are accesible in the "matlist" property). Any change on them, will be updated safely in the automaterial. In this case, would be necessary to create a "Blend" for each material, but this process may be automatized by Maxscript.

Regarding the XRef question, i think you can xref the objects but not the materials.

Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

jonavark

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Re: Need a little help with materials & matte shadow switching
« Reply #2 on: April 23, 2012, 10:21:40 PM »
ok.. sounds good.. I was trying to take a shortcut..  thanks for the reminder. All working now. Just a few more lines of code..

thanks!