[Josephus Holt]

I have a number of block instances and when I selected all objects and assigned the "clay" Maxwell MXM to all selected, I found that some of the block instances do not render out with that assigned material eventhough the material shows assigned to that object in the matarials tab of the Scene Manager. How do I get "inside" the Rhino block instance to assign the desired Maxwell material?

[kami]

i usually acheive this by assigning the material directly to the layer of the object INSIDE the block.
OR you could assign your material before creating the block.

working with blocks in rhino isnt as easy as with components in sketchup

[JDHill]

If you want to change the material of objects within a block instance, you need to have set their assignment to 'by parent' before making the block. If you don't do that, then each object in the definition will use the material of the layer it is on when the block is defined. With 'by parent', then the objects in the definition use either their layer material, or if one is defined, the material assigned to each individual block instance. As such, you are restricted, when using 'by parent' to allow different assignments on each block instance, to assigning a single material to each instance, and do not have individual access to each object within the block. The other alternative is to do as Kami said and assign materials before defining the block, but in this case, your assignments are baked into the block definition.

Simple, huh?

[Josephus Holt]

Thank you both for your replies...ughh...I guess that means "adios" blocks. It's a good thing I have 12GB ram on this puppy...will be interesting to see once I get all the trees in the scene.

BTW....JD, don't you ever take the day off (I'm glad you're "there"...it seems all the time ). Joe

[JDHill]

I think blocks will work perfectly fine for trees and such, and working with the plugin, they are actually much more useable than they would be using normal Rhino materials. Meaning, it is the assignment which gets locked in, and not the material's actual definition, which remains editable via the plugin's material editor. Using the plugin material's MXM Link feature, you can even completely switch out a material's complete definition with that of another mxm, and this will immediately be applied to any entity which uses that material, regardless of where it derives its assignment from.

(work-wise, I guess you're not exactly taking the day off either, so... )

[Josephus Holt]

I think blocks will work perfectly fine for trees and such, and working with the plugin, they are actually much more useable than they would be using normal Rhino materials. Meaning, it is the assignment which gets locked in, and not the material's actual definition, which remains editable via the plugin's material editor. Using the plugin material's MXM Link feature, you can even completely switch out a material's complete definition with that of another mxm, and this will immediately be applied to any entity which uses that material, regardless of where it derives its assignment from.

(work-wise, I guess you're not exactly taking the day off either, so... )

I can see that about the trees/materials. Since I'm quite new to Rhino and using instances with Maxwell, I noticed quite a few posts on the forum regarding issues where intersecting instances slow Maxwell down quite a bit. I never saw any answers from NL regarding whether this was addressed in v2. With trees it's quite easy to get overlapping/intersecting branches/leaves...is this going to be a problem (still) for me if I place them as instances?

[JDHill]

Really, I don't know...back in the day I used to be a beta tester, so I would've known then, but nowadays I don't usually find enough time to study many apects of the engine in depth. I thought during the V2 development cycle that I'd heard of this having been addressed, but I don't know for sure. An anecdotal test here is showing a benchmark of 67.29 for a scene with 400 instances intersecting one another, and 69.51 with them separated, so apparently there's still some degradation, but as to exactly how much, it would probably be highly scene-dependent.

[Josephus Holt]

As far as I'm concerned, that's a very low level of degradation. Thx for the reply.

[kami]

I wish it'd be easier to work with blocks in rhino ...
but there are a few techniques that work fine: (feel free to add more)

A - you can always explode one block, change its material or geometry and then create a block instance with the same name again. It'll update all other block instances in the scene. Just be sure to use the same reference point (I always inculde one Point into the block)

B - save the block in another rhino file and link it there. Now you can easily change the other file and all imported blocks will be updated on reopening

C - if you got objects with multiple materials, just make one layer inside the block for each material. You can now change the material for all objects easily without having to touch the block itself.

[Josephus Holt]

thx for the suggestions Kami...that looks very workable. Joe