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Good morning friends,

As a novice I have a general question about downlaoding material from the Resources website. I bring them into the materials database/mxm materials folder. Each one comes in its own individual folder and seems to contain one or more jpg's, sometimes a bump.jpg, an emitter had a .png, one fabric had an "r2", etc.

The question I has to do with the fact that the mxm files that came with the program had no other files with them. The materials folder that came with maxwell just had a bunch a mxm files in it. No jpgs etc. The question I have is when I download material from the Resources website -- should I leave the entire folder with all its contents in my mxm materials folder and when I'm importing mxm into a rhino file should I link to the mxm file inside each material's folder, or should I take the mxm file out of the folder it came in and keep it with the rest of the mxm files that have no jpg's with them?

Which brings up a more general question: Is an mxm file complete in itself and if so why do we need the jpg's?

Thanks

Cosmas Demetriou

MXM files reference external textures; that is why you sometimes find that downloaded MXMs have textures packaged with them. See the answer (i.e. Pack and Go and Search Paths) to your other question for the rest; it should apply here as well.

Hello Cosmas,

Yes, any MXM material file that comes with jpg texture maps needs them, so you should keep them together in the same folder.

The MXM file is a material description, meaning that it includes the numeric values that describes its reaction to light (roughness, transmittance, refraction index, etc).
But to enrich the look, we usually use texture maps for most variables (color, bump, roughness, etc) instead of plain single numeric values.

So, the MXM file includes the material description and the links to the texture maps used for that material.

Instead of embedding the maps inside the MXM file, we maintain the textures maps linked outside, so when you want to customize your materials, you can easily customize the maps.

For instance, when you download a material file for a concrete, you will get the MXM file and the texture maps needed. You can customize the material easily by changing the textures, while it will remain being a concrete (as long as you don't change the values in the MXM file).

As most of the materials included in the materials database with the Maxwell installation are simple materials without textures (simple diffuse, plastics, etc) they do not need any texture map, although anyway you can always use maps to customize them.

Let me know if this answers your question.

Greetings

Dario Lanza

Very cool. The MXM file contains the material description and the texture maps contain the color, bump, roughness etc.

Thank you very much to both of you.

Cosmasad