we need MASTER MATERIALS

[JML]

I think it would be very useful for everybody, example:

for example, an interior, you have 50 objects in a scene, 5-20 surfaces per objects, 60 of them have the same wood material.
(the objects were modeled by 5 different people labelling their surfaces name
differently. so hard to find which one should be wood or metal or ...)

The client change his mind at the last minute (of course) and want all the wood to be another kind of wood.

you have to hunt down all the surfaces which has wood on it to replace it with the new wood.. so much time

with master materials, you would have one surface wood assigned to all those
60 surfaces. and when you change the master materials, it changes all of them
in real time.

anybody else think it would be very very useful ?

[Dodgy]

How exactly would you implement this? Have a pointer from the master surface to each bit?

You say each object has a different name for their bits, why not use Parts for those, and use 'Wood' for the surface name? Then use Edit by scene in the surfaces editor to change them all at once.

[Wade]

Wood surfaces in a given room will all need to be different even on the same object as the grain of the wood may need to be rotated for the legs vertically while the table top will have it running horizontally. One surface may be a derivative of another but they will need to be named differently.

Your naming conventions could help out (filter by name) as it is displayed in alphabetical order in the texture editor and thus easier to find and modify or change.

Say all wood objects get a name like -

Wood Chair red oak
Wood Floor sub floor plywood pine
Wood Floor Texas Honey Mesquite
Wood Floor White oak
Wood table cherry legs
Wood table cherry top

Rather than having them all over the place like -

Red Oak on the chair
Dinning room table Cherry
Wood white oak floor
Texas honey mesquite flooring the 2nd hardest stuff in available
CDX play wood sub floor sanded smooth surface up…..

Somebody needs to create a default list of all possible surfaces for the project and name them / create folders for them before hand and go from there.


Now I might agree that being able to select multiple surfaces at once and apply a given material would be very helpful from time to time, but you need to get your team on the same page and work from the same play book to make your work go more smoothly.

Just because you can group things together and have a master does not mean that your team will put the right surface in the right master group if they can’t name things sensibly to begin with.

Always room for improvement in LW, but much is left undiscovered or unused.

Wade

[ingo]

It kind of works if you call all your wood wood. In the surface editor simply select edit by scene (not by the default object) and you only have to work on one wood. Take care that you name every surface. I didn't named my 2D clip-people, the all had the surface default. So when i changed the sorting in the surface editor now i had several copies of only one person.

But while youre at it copying Electric Image, how about Master Lights ? No more crashing scene editor when editing 30 lights that are actually the same. Much better though to make a Light editor that works like the surface editor.

[JML]

I can work without having master materials but I'm just saying that having them will make things faster sometimes.

I personnaly have no problem with spreadsheet editor, it works great here,
they could add somewhere in the spreadsheet all the surface attributes, that could work.

copying electric image? is it the only software which has this ? I would be surprised if no other software had that..

master materials are I think the only thing I like about electricimage :)
they use electric image in the company I work for and they are starting to learn LW now... really cool
(I was the only LW guy there, they started giving me some projects to do in LW,
and after that they gave me a lot more, and now they are thinking on slowly changing to LW, sweet) (they will probably still use EI for some huge projects though)

[Dodgy]

You do know you can multi-select surfaces in the surface editor and edit textures this way?

[JML]

yes...

I guess we don't "need" master materials, it would just make thing easier sometimes I think..

[Lightwolf]

I guess we don't "need" master materials, it would just make thing easier sometimes I think..
While I like the idea, I'd rather hold of and hope for a nodal shading interface that allows multiple surfaces to use a base node :) Now that would be neat...

Cheers,
Mike

[JML]

While I like the idea, I'd rather hold of and hope for a nodal shading interface that allows multiple surfaces to use a base node :) Now that would be neat...

not sure if I understand.., what is it?

[Lightwolf]

not sure if I understand.., what is it?
I hope your familiar with nodal interfaces, like for example a flow in DF.
No imagine, not a single shader nodal "flow" per surface, but something like a global shader "flow" space for the whole scene.
So you could basically hook up any surface to any other surface, or even any [T] texture to any other.
A surface would then just be a node that gets its values (surface attributes) from just about any other nod in the "flow". That way you could easily create a master surface, but also a series of other surfaces derived from that.
I hope that makes it a bit clearer...

Cheers,
Mike

[JML]

thanks lightwolf , interesting

[Lightwolf]

thanks lightwolf , interesting
Yeah, unfortunately very houdini like, and nthing I'd expect to see within LW in the next couple of years ;)
Cheery,
Mike