[hatts]

Is there any way to enable undo/redo while editing a material within C4D? Right now undos/redos just apply to the host application, even if the focus is on the material editor.

Secondly, is there a way to batch-apply texture settings to multiple fields? For instance, if I change the tiling on refl. 90 of layer 1 bsdf 1, it's a little tedious to manually change the tiling on every other field of every bsdf that uses textures.

Thanks in advance

[JDHill]

On the first question, no, the material editor does not support undo; on the second, yes, you can apply changes to all textures in either the current BSDF (or Coating, etc), all components in the current Layer, or for all textures in the entire material, by using the CTRL/SHIFT/ALT modifier keys, respectively. Please note that those assignments will be changing slightly in the future, though, as discussed here.

[eric nixon]

Why would anyone ever need to change tiling for a whole material? I dont get that. And generally we only need to change the relative tiling ratio between two maps in a material, which are most likely in the same bsdf, or layer, so changing the tiling of both maps by the same amount seems pointless. What is the situation where any of this is useful? Am I being very dim? just dont get it.

[hatts]

Thanks for the info JD

Eric: I guess conversely I don't understand how you get by withOUT changing all tiling at once...?
If you want to uniformly scale your texture, do you strictly use the C4D texture tag?

[JDHill]

You've never used several maps (refl, bump, roughness) derived from the same original map? In such a case, let's say that your bump map is in global bump, your refl0 map in one bsdf, and your roughness map in another. Now change their tiling.

[eric nixon]

Ah cool thanks JD, now I get that you want to change a certain NAMED map wherever it occurs in mxm/layer/bsdf. seems obvious now.

hatts wrote;

If you want to uniformly scale your texture, do you strictly use the C4D texture tag?

Ofcourse I do. thats much quicker no?... I mean you can change all the c4d tags that use that material at the same time if you want, just multi-select in the assign list.

[hatts]

Yeah, in fact I'd rather do that. I always thought I vaguely remembered reading that you should control all tiling via MXED rather than C4D texture tag. Could be a complete subconscious fabrication...

Anyhow that's squared away now, thanks all

[JDHill]

In general, yes, you should prefer to control tiling/offset in the Maxwell material, for a couple of reasons:

• Changes can be seen instantly in Fire, since you are not altering UVs.
• There are things you can do with a texture tag, which are not translatable.

The latter is the sticking point: since there may be multiple textures in the Maxwell material, we can find no 1:1 relationship between their parameters and the semantically-similar ones found in the texture tag. For example, say that you have two textures in your Maxwell material, where one has tiling enabled, and the other does not. How can we map the Tile checkbox in the texture tag during export? The answer is that we can't. How can we map the Repetitions U & V parameters in the tag? They have no analog in Maxwell. So except in those cases where you can guarantee that factors such as these will not be in play, the safe bet is to control values directly in your Maxwell textures.

[eric nixon]

Sorry this isnt practical from a workflow POV, with C4d controls you get interactive feedback in opengl. Working with c4d for texture positioning is literally 100x faster, it gives instant feedback.

I accept that there are rare occasions when its neccesary to fiddle with the mxm too.

Sorry to labour the point, but theres a conceptual issue here, which is that the material (mxm) and it how its mapped are seperate entities, (disregarding UV wrapped stuff)

re. tiling, yes, C4d's controls have no effect, just wanted to say that it doesnt show up that the tiling is disabled in opengl, so you need to find the 'abled quadrant' of the mapping.

In the past you helped me to simplify my mapping when c4d got confused by the complicated projection, but in that case it wasnt a maxwell specific issue as C4D also failed to render what the opengl showed.

[hatts]

Thanks JD/eric

Behold, a dichotomy:

with C4d controls you get interactive feedback in opengl

Changes can be seen instantly in Fire, since you are not altering UVs.

I guess it comes down to a workflow decision.