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Forum topic · General Scripting

Changing Material Class

By Jamie Clay · 2010-11-01

Description

I've been doing some material managing between different renderers and have some useful tools for propagating mass changes to materials when needed.

One thing I need to deal with often are renderers that don't support material Class X so I want to change any instances of that to the supported Material Class Y.

I know many of the shader settings don't map across but for now what will be doing is capturing basics like diffuse color and various bitmaps from the original material then after conversion of the material class, transferring the captured data.

My only roadblock right now is understanding how to change the material class, say from 'Standardmaterial ()' to 'Arch___Design__mi ()'

Thanks,

j-me

Comments (5)

Jamie Clay · 2010-11-09

Hey thanks - I'll look at those but I did come up with a nice script to do my immediate needs - once I refine it, I'll post it.

jamie

draging · 2010-11-11

nice, goodluck jamie...

Graph · 2010-11-02

you cant change the material class
you can check the var the material is stored in, copy it to a custom local var in a script and assign a new material of the new class to the original var
there already are some tools out there that do what you request, just search for the renderer you like to have as a target

Jamie Clay · 2010-11-02

I thought that might be the case. Damn - the thing is what I want to do I can do in the materials editor - call up a material from the scene, change the Class and then assign the maps from the previous material.

But Maxscript leaves me short.

I've been looking for scripts that do anything similar, can you pop me a link to one of the ones you've seen?

Thanks

Jamie