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Materials help About Truespace Archives These pages are a copy of the official truespace forums prior to their removal somewhere around 2011. They are retained here for archive purposes only. Materials help // New Users 1  |   Order by default Post by sj41 // Aug 31, 2008, 8:43am sj41 Total Posts: 31 I'm not exactly a new user -- I've had tS from 2 through 6.6, but I'm new to 7.x and don't have a clue about how to make new materials in the Workspace. The LE seems to be the only way and it has a very steep learning curve -- and the manual isn't helping me. It gives me no information about what different bricks do, why I need them or how to connect them. The videos that I've seen are just recipes for doing specific tasks -- they don't tell me why I need the bricks or why they're connected the way they are. I can't even figure out how to place a bitmap on a face. I don't want a recipe. If I have to work with this (essentially programming) approach to material design, I want to know how to approach it -- what bricks do, what bricks are needed for a specific task, and how to connect them. Where do I find this info? Post by robert // Aug 31, 2008, 11:08am robert Total Posts: 609 You could apply the materials using the Vray material editor even if you don't have Vray. Or you could go to the model side apply the textures there and have them transfer over. As for the D3D materials you will always need the "Shader Input" brick as this will take scene data and convert it into data that can be used in the ME. You can find this brick in the compilers library which is the second icon in the group of six when you open the D3D material editor. You will also probably want the "Material" brick located in the same library. What I did is simply open all six library panels changed the view in each, except the LE, to 1D and started mixing and experimenting. If you usesomething and it has an input slot that has the same name as one of the outputs in the "Shader Input" brick you should most likely hook it up. As for what each brick does, load one read the text fields and experiment some with it. The math bricks are fairly self explanatory. My advice would be to open pre-existing D3D materials and look at their inner workings, try disconnecting a few things and changing values around and see what happens. Hopefully when you do that you'll understand what does what and can go from there. Post by Heidi // Sep 3, 2008, 8:06am Heidi Total Posts: 335 I'm going address the DX9 materials because the vRay material editor works pretty much the same as the ME on the modeler side. If you want to get into creating complex materials with special properties, it can get really complex. Digging into some of the complex materials in the library and slogging through the manual and using the tutorials are the best option for doing that. But unless you really want to create a completely new material, the easiest approach is to start from an existing material. The ones that I use most often are Texture, TextureBump and TextureBumpAlpha. With the DX9 materials, 'bump' means a normal map, not a greyscale height map. If you want to use the TextureBumpAlpha but don't have a normal map to apply, right-click the normal map thrumbnail to reset it to neutral. You don't need to use the link editor to modify materials. Everything you need is in the material edior panel. The default tab on the upper right of the 3D3 material editor is for the color input. If you're using a materal that requires a normal map and/or alpha map, the default tab will show dropdown selections for editing those. You can use the paintbrush to apply your material to a single face. You can also select multiple faces in point edit and use the paint brush to apply the material to the selected faces. The funnel icon applies the material to the entire object. When the material is applied to your entire object and your object selected, you can right-click in a library and insert-as 3D3 material to make it available for use on other objects. Double-clicking on a material in the library will apply it to the entire object. Or you can drag the material's icon onto the object in either the workspace or the link editor to apply the material to the entire object. The example in the attached video shows using both the paintbrush and the funnel. You don't have to use both.

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