[caryjames]

Hi guys- I have now made the switch to V2 and have a couple of questions.

It appears that at least one of my materials opened up in a different way than I had expected, I had a material which used 3 different ior files but now when I open it in V2 none of those ior files load- or indicate which files are on which BSDF. So I think I have to go back and re create the material.

I have heard talk about optimizing materials for V2, are there any tutorials / tips for optimizing 1.7 materials? I checked THINK but came up empty. I have watched MVerta's video so maybe it is just easier to build new materials when needed but I am curious as to what everyone else is doing.

Thanks

[caryjames]

Alright got it.. my ior files were not missing I just needed to click on the BSDF and then select 'Measured Value' they did not come up automatically.

The only other strange thing is that I added a new layer to test this new layering system out (I want to add a shiny metal over top of some rougher metal- opacity set at 10.00) and the bump is fixed at 30.00 even though I did not select any bump value and I can not remove or change that Bump value.

Thanks as usual

[JDHill]

Unless the bump map is assigned and enabled, it should not matter what the value is set to, and the numeric input should be disabled. Does that match up with what you're seeing there?

[caryjames]

Hi JD- Thanks - I don't think that Bump is enabled just strange that it is set to a pre determined value.

Is the consensus that we need to recreate the materials from 1.7. I have read through most of the manual but did not find any mention of the transition for older materials to the new system.

I will also do a bit more searching in THINK and see what pops up.

Last question.

The multilight feature now picks up the material name- I use a lot of mxi emitters and it picks up the material name not the object name- even though I use the same emitting material for different emitting objects. I know that I can clone and re name materials to get around this but was wondering if this is the best workflow.

[JDHill]

It's just 30.0 because that is the default value for Bump now; should be the same when you create a new material.

On recreating materials, if you are serious about results, then that's what I would usually recommend; start with the translated version, but make sure to check it and then make any necessary adjustments. Maxwell and the plugin do try to translate them as much as possible, but with the material system basically being and unlimited one, and radically-different results being achievable via unpredictable strategies, it cannot be an exact science. Rule of thumb would be: think of a layer in the 2.x setup as you used to think of an entire material. If your 1.x material used Normal blending mode, you're most likely looking at a 2.x material that has one layer with several BSDFs; conversely, if it used Additive blending, then you would want several Layers in 2.x, with one BSDF from the 1.x material put into each one.

On multilight, it works differently in 2.x. In 1.x, you would have one ML slider for each emitter object; in 2.x, you have one for each emitter material. There have been discussions about which one was better, but in 1.x, there were constant questions about how to make several objects use the same ML slider; in Rhino you'd have to extract the render meshes, then Join them, then assign an emitter to the joined multi-piece mesh; in 2.x, you just apply the same emitter to all the objects. It may be that in a future update, there will be a switch in the emitter to determine which of those behaviors it will use; until then, you will have one ML slider per emitter material.

[caryjames]

Thanks JD- I will have to get to work . I think that the Multilight one slider solution is cleaner than joining meshes... I only needed the feature once and the join meshes process was too much of a hassle so I just used different sliders. I really like the new slider system.... it will take a while to get used to the interface but it is very nice so far!

Thanks for getting back to me with the clarification.