[John Layne]

Can't for the life of me figure out how to work with textures in the Studio. Read the manual till the ink wore out!

I have created the scene as per my first test and tried to apply all sorts of textures couldn't get anything to work.

Note did not apply any textures in SolidWorks, because they're a little bit on the crappy side.

Did manage to crash Maxwell a few times, when deleting a projector from the projections list when a projector was hightlighted in the Objecparams window.

Frustrated to hell at the moment, can't understand how channels relate to anything! Do channel numbers match projector numbers??? can only find reference to chanels when in the projections param table how does this relate to anything else.

Aggererhhhhehhehehe that feels better having a good vent. Off to bed now, hopefully someone will have written an idiot proof tutorial on textures for when I wake up.

[Fernando Tella]

Mike advised (and I do now) to set the UVW maps in your host application instead of studio. Projectors in studio are a pain right now. Just import your geometry with the uvw map applyed and finish the material setup in studio. What I'm doing lately is making fast materials in host app and apply them to the objects so I can place the maps correctly; after that export to mxs, open in studio and correct and finish the translated materials without touching projectors. Diffuse, metals and dielectrics are quite well replicated, but plastics need some corrections. Maps are automatically translated to the correct place.

[JesperW]

Mike advised (and I do now) to set the UVW maps in your host application instead of studio.

The poor guy obviously doesn't know SolidWorks. Big laugh....

[Eric Lagman]

Mike advised (and I do now) to set the UVW maps in your host application instead of studio. Projectors in studio are a pain right now. Just import your geometry with the uvw map applyed and finish the material setup in studio. What I'm doing lately is making fast materials in host app and apply them to the objects so I can place the maps correctly; after that export to mxs, open in studio and correct and finish the translated materials without touching projectors. Diffuse, metals and dielectrics are quite well replicated, but plastics need some corrections. Maps are automatically translated to the correct place.

Oh man if only it were that easy in SW. SW does not even have normal directions for surfaces. And the texture placement mine as well not even be there based on how bad it is at the moment. We have to create emitters with thickness. Dieletrics can not even be applied to a single surface of a solid object etc etc. The list goes on and on. We have one hand tied behind our back to begin with before we even get into studio. This is the price of working in a CAD app I guess. That was a good laugh though I must say.

To answer your question John the number in the texture creation tab 1-20 or whatever applies to the projector of the object. You can have more than 1 projector type for an object. When you import model from sw the projector the object comes in with is locked. Unlock it and set it to the projection you want. Flat, spherical, cubic etc. Then tweak the scale number to get the tiling right. I must say it is a bit clunky, and took me a while to figure out. I would hate to have to place a decal centered on an object in studio. You cant drag the texture with your mouse like in other 3d apps. I guess you would have to keep entering numeical paramaters until you got the decal where you wanted. If you just need something like a bump map or wood texture that tiles its not so bad once you figure out how it works. Hope this helps.

[Fernando Tella]

Yep, I don't know SW. I thought it was a more... complete app. How did you managed with the beta?

Maybe you can export to another program...


... So studio's projectors are something you were looking forward to use...

I see... Have courage!

One useful tip: In the projectors params panel (and in most of docked panels) you can click with the middle mouse button and drag up and down to increase or decrease the parameters. It's much like dragging the map. I like it too for moving objects fast.

[Eric Lagman]

Yep, I don't know SW. I thought it was a more... complete app. How did you managed with the beta?

Maybe you can export to another program...


... So studio's projectors are something you were looking forward to use...

I see... Have courage!

One useful tip: In the projectors params panel (and in most of docked panels) you can click with the middle mouse button and drag up and down to increase or decrease the parameters

Its ok man. How did we mange you ask. Well if you look through any images posted most of them have no textures. The projector thing in studio is better than what we had in sw which is pretty funny actually. I am confident they will make it better in the future though. Once the heirarchy thing gets fixed so that bodies have actual faces we can pick instead of triangles we will be on our way. Its getting there slowly but surely. It will all be good in the end, and with each release better and better.

[juan]

Hi,

We are improving a lot the texturing tools for the next version of Studio. I am sure you will like it.

btw, have you tried using the triangle selection tools of studio? selecting SW faces into studio now is not very difficult with the new version of the plugin, most of the times you just need to click in a triangle and press "/" ( or "+" to expand it) . do you find it useful?

Cheers,

Juan

[Eric Lagman]

Hi,

We are improving a lot the texturing tools for the next version of Studio. I am sure you will like it.

btw, have you tried using the triangle selection tools of studio? selecting SW faces into studio now is not very difficult with the new version of the plugin, most of the times you just need to click in a triangle and press "/" ( or "+" to expand it) . do you find it useful?

Cheers,

Juan

Juan,

The triangle tool is useful for flat surfaces, but on something like I am showing here it doesn't work well. If I expand my selection it bleeds into triangles that I dont need to select. If there was some sort of tangecy triangle selection that would be nice, but you cant really have tangency with triangles I suppose. I tried doing a window grab selection, but it is diffcult also when trying to select only a precise area. Maybe I am using the tool wrong? I tried all the methods you mentioned. I could lower the mesh to make less triangles, but with really curvy stuff it becomes all facated.

[John Layne]

Hi Juan,

I agree with Eric, I haven't been able to see a use for it in my work expect on flat surfaces.

[juan]

Hi Eric and John,

I think there are ways to select the triangles you need easily. Can you send me this model to maxwelltech@nextlimit.com ? I would like to take a look to make the selection as easy as possible for you. Also there are ways to expand the selection (with "/", "." and "*") to the connected mesh that should work fine in this case. In teh menu preferences of Studio there is a parameter in the openGL tab to adjust the thresold angle to merge facets. By default this is 1 degree. It means that in "hidden line" shading mode, all the faces with the direction of the normal vector smaller than this value are merged into the same facet. You can increase this threshold angle to greater values to expand the selection to non-flat faces.

But also there are other ways to make an easy selection. You can select inside SW all the faces you need and apply different materials to each one. Then you open the mxs into Studio and you can enable the "material selection" mode, so when clicking any objects, all the entities with this material applied will be selected, and you can replace the material with other advanced one.

Regards,

Juan