[purCAB]

I'm sure that there is something I'm doing wrong (or not doing!) but I cannot get a texture to rotate by utilizing the plugin's Texture Rotation slider.

I select an object (in this case an assembly component), adjust the rotation slider, select a material, and RMB to Assign to Selected. No combination of clicks, slider position, etc. seems to make any difference. I have tried this using two separate materials (both with textures), tried assigning the material first and then adjust the rotation slider and vis-versa. I re-read the Object Properties section from the 1.7 User's Guide, but did not see anything that pertained to this problem.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thx

---

Ken

[JDHill]

Hi Ken,

The rotation slider is just a shortcut to the regular SW rotation slider, so the target entity needs to be selected in order for it to have any effect. Quick steps to get going would be:

- create a part
- draw a cube
- make an assembly from the part
- insert a few of the cubes
- select a textured material (make sure it has an active texture)
- assign the material (with nothing selected, dragdrop will assign at the body-level)
- select one of the bodies
- adjust the rotation

Let me know if this gets you pointed in the right direction.

JD

[purCAB]

Buenas.

OK, here is some additional information. A texture (not an mxm) applied via the standard SW add/remove Texture allows the plugin's Texture Rotation to work as expected (this seems to work not only for a body, but for other levels as well). However if you try to assign a Maxwell material (.mxm) via the plugin (Maxwell Tools) then it does not seem possible to rotate the material texture (and the underlying UV mapping) without going into Studio. The material that is associated with that object does appear correctly in the Applied Materials box, but there does not appear to be any control of its orientation or sizing.

Ken

[JDHill]

Hmm, works fine here. Do I recall correctly that you're on 2008 SP4? I'll try switching to that and see if something's been broken. Meanwhile, am I to understand that the exact steps I outlined above are not working (i.e. indicating an inability to remove existing material appearances)? How about if you remove the SW textures before switching to the Maxwell one - would it work for you then? Also, do you see any difference there when using .sldprt vs. .sldasm? Also, are you using RealView?

Thanks...

[purCAB]

JD, thanks for the very quick reply.

Yes, SW2008 SP4. Most recent testing based on your prior input was to create a single .SLDPRT from scratch. I then tried adding the materials/textures to this part -- no assemblies -- at the body as well as face level. I don't seem to have a problem removing/applying either the textures or the materials. Rather, I cannot manipulate (specifically rotate) an mxm applied via the plugin. I can take the texture file of an mxm material and add that as an SW texture and I can rotate that. Regarding RealView, no this particular machine does not support RealView.

Ken

[JDHill]

Plugging into this application makes me just a little crazy sometimes - this stuff is all working fine here on SW2008 SP0.0/3.1/4.0 (Vista32, SWx86), .sldprt/.sldasm, RealView on/off. Imho, it works better than the SW texture interface, since you don't need to explicitly bring entities up in the FeatureManager...but all of that is not worth much if it doesn't work correctly there. Sorry for the trouble anyway, I'll try to think of what could be holding things up - please let me know if there is any other small detail you can think of for me to test here.

[purCAB]

I just tested on another of our machines -- this one supports RealView -- with the same result. Here is the sequence: Create new part in SW2008 SP4 (just a simple cube--one sketch, one extrude); Add a material to either the Materials Catalog in Maxwell Tools or directly via MXM Browser (e.g. boards-01 from Arroway). If via the Catalog, then select body and add material. Clicking on the body confirms that the material is associated with the body; Adjust texture rotation to approx 45 degree point; Export to Studio. As far as I can tell, the texture (UV) rotation remains the same regardless of the Texture Rotation slider position.

Additional data: Assigning a texture (not an appearance nor a material) works as indicated. Turing RealView on makes it impossible to assign a simple texture and also seems to have the same effect.

Sorry, I just don't see what I'm doing wrong. But from the response, it seems like this is not a problem that others are running into.

Ken

[JDHill]

I have to clarify this part, just to make sure:

Clicking on the body confirms that the material is associated with the body;

Clicking on it may tell you that there is a Material assigned, and it may also tell you it's assigned to the body, but that is different than selecting the body - difference being:

face selected:




body selected:




To adjust the rotation of the body's texture, it must actually be the selected entity. Otherwise you are probably adjusting the rotation of the face which was clicked, which has no Material assigned, and having no SW texture, will store no rotation information.

There's another thing that might help me to see where something's getting lost: forget for a minute that there's any rotation slider in the plugin. Assign a textured Maxwell Material to the body, select it, and open SW's texture-editor in the FeatureManager. Adjust the rotation there and render - the rotation should export doing things this way too. Depending on how that works, maybe I can start to narrow things down.

[purCAB]

JD, based on the comments in the last paragraph of your most recent post, perhaps here is the issue. If I assign an mxm material (not the material's .jpg texture, but the .mxm) via the Maxwell plugin then there is 1) no texture slider in the SW texture editor; 2) there is no indication that a material has been applied to the part in terms of visual feedback in the SW viewport; 3) It is clear that the material has been assigned because the plugin's Object Properties reflects the material when the object in question is identified and exporting to Studio shows the proper materials attached to the proper objects.

I cannot (or don't know how to) assign a Maxwell material via the SW Color/Texture or Appearance interface. Turning RealView on, eliminates the Color/Texture screen and replaces it with the Appearance Screen. Appearance files (.p2m) have a different type of texture mapping and under the Mapping tab one can choose mapping type, size, etc. Some of the mapping types offer a rotation adjustment, but there does not appear to be any sharing of this control between the plugin and SW.


Ken

[JDHill]

...there is 1) no texture slider in the SW texture editor; 2) there is no indication that a material has been applied to the part in terms of visual feedback in the SW viewport

Does the Maxwell material have a texture selected? If none is selected, the plugin thinks that you want to see the underlying (i.e. bsdf/subsurface/etc.) makeup of the material in the SW viewport.

I cannot (or don't know how to) assign a Maxwell material via the SW Color/Texture or Appearance interface...

That's fine, there is no facility to accomodate this type of assignment - plugin material-assignment must be done by drag-drop, or pre-select/assign to selected.

Turning RealView on, eliminates the Color/Texture screen and replaces it with the Appearance Screen. Appearance files (.p2m) have a different type of texture mapping and under the Mapping tab one can choose mapping type, size, etc. Some of the mapping types offer a rotation adjustment, but there does not appear to be any sharing of this control between the plugin and SW.

This is where things get funky - the plugin uses the 2007 API, which has no knowledge of RealView, and therefore deals only in regular SW materials. SolidWorks 2008 supports both types, so there is apparently a whole set of rules of precedence that comes into play regarding RealView materials vs. SW materials in the viewport. Depending solely on video-card settings, I have either been able to see textured SW (non-RealView) materials, not been able to see them, or been able to see them on bodies/components but not faces/features...and so on. The behavior is pretty haphazard. The clearest path is to explicitly remove RealView materials, and this seems to allow SW to work with regular SW materials (after all, this is what you are seeing generated by the plugin) in the viewport.

[purCAB]

JD, I am unclear as how to confirm if the Maxwell material has a texture selected or not. I did not find any reference to this in either of the manuals...sorry.

Regarding the removal of RealView materials, this can be difficult or actually impossible if the file already has a RealView material and you are attempting to edit it on a machine that doesn't support RealView. As far as I have been able to determine, once added, a RealView Appearance cannot be removed by your "average Joe", you must have a machine that supports RealView and it must be active.

Ken

[JDHill]

Left-clicking any texture button in the Material Editor makes it the currently-selected texture - if there is no file assigned to the selected texture, then there is effectively no selected texture, and the basic color/transparency of the material is shown.

re. the RealView thing, I'm not exactly seeing that here at least in respect to it being active - when I switch it off, SW converts it to a regular SW material, and I can edit or remove the texture via the regular SW texture interface. If I switch it back on, the RV material is shown again.

[purCAB]

JD, I was looking for some sort of "secret handshake", but if all you mean by "currently selected texture" is to ensure that the material file has valid texture files, then yes the textures (reflectance, bump, etc.) are all valid. In addition to some of my own .mxm's, I have been mostly testing with the Arroway Boards-01 material. The texture appears correctly (when Textured or Textured Decal is selected) in Studio and renders properly, so that would seem to suggest the material file itself is OK. It's (only?) that I can neither see the material when I add it to my part/assembly, nor can I control the texture rotation. In Studio I can control all of the parms fine.

Ken

[JDHill]

Hi Ken, no I didn't mean valid, each material has one texture which is considered to be the selected texture, and it is set by left-clicking. If I import Boards-01, there is no currently-selected texture in that .mxm; I need to select one:



Every time you import Boards-01, the plugin will read it the same as the time before, and there will be no selected texture. However, if you drag an already-imported material from the database, rather than importing the .mxm again, and this material had a texture selected last time you used it, then it will still be selected now. In fact, the plugin remembers alot of things - if you notice, for each material it also remembers the BSDF, SubSurface, etc., which was last used.

[purCAB]

FINALLY! I now understand what has been going on...From your comments I knew that I had missed something regarding the "select texture", so I went back and tried again, this time paying very careful attention to the texture details and instead of using MXED, I used the Material Editor (which I thought were the same...obviously not).

In my prior attempts, I have generally opened the materials via MXM Browser. I would locate a material of interest, right click to open in MXED and confirm that everything looked good. I would then click on the texture icon and this opens a separate texture window. It shows the texture, the full path to the texture...all of which were correct. So no problems in the material file. Since everything was OK, I close MXED and then dragged the material from the browser to the part. The plugin adds the material to the part and to the Materials Catalog. But the only way I can confirm that it had added the material to the part is because the Applied Material window changes from NoPreview to the just added material. So I'm thinking everything is OK, even though the SW viewport doesn't reflect this. If I export to Studio, it's OK there too. I go back and click on the image under Applied Material and get a Material Editor (I assume that this is MXED, which is probably isn't). I look at the Status and there is a green OK next to Has Bad Paths. So I again assume all is well and close it. Only after re-reading JD's post for the 5th time, does it dawn on my to click on the actual texture icons in this version of the Material Editor. Now it works! By the way, clicking on the texture icons in MXED do not resolve the issue.

Now that I have "seen the light", it all seems so...easy. But perhaps I might suggest a couple of possible enhancements. 1) When the Material Editor opens after clicking on the material image under the Applied Material heading, have the status reflect the plugin's view of the world. Instead of a simple No for Has Bad Paths, consider Inactive, or Not Activated, etc. 2) Why is it necessary to select the path in this manner at all? Under what circumstances would you not want the texture to be activated? Consider having the plugin "auto-select" the texture and all of this is avoided; 3) Finally, and this is really outside the scope of this post, but adding a sizing adjustment would better allow one to go directly to render without running through Studio under more circumstances than can be dealt with by rotation alone.

JD, thanks very much for your patience. Sorry I didn't catch on until the end.

Ken