Is it possible to create or use a material sphere (like in the material editor) in a script?
I’ve only really uncovered ways to manipulate the materials in the editor.
The intent of my script is this:
Converting Materials from Vray to Standard, Standard to Vray, and a few other combinations.
Comparing the differences or similarities between two materials.
I’ve attached a screen of what I’m looking to do. Essentially I just want the preview spheres and to have the numbers and fields directly effect them but being able to have 2 different materials and types side by side.
Unless I’m missing something I think that you would have to manually render that your self. Not sure how to go about that. I’m sure Bobo has a solution if he is around.
It’s not directly possible. Bobo did indeed do a workaround already involving creating a temporary sphere way outside of the scene, rendering it in the background and using that image.
I think he did that for Treematograph (Dark side of the moon area on his webpage)
Regards,
Thorsten
it’s exactly what i do. I create a mesh outside the scene and a camera for render (both might be hidden) and render it to texture. After that I use the texture (bitmap) in my UI.
The rendering takes the same amount of time as mat editor rendering but the result is more accurate, because some of my materials require more then one texture channels or some specific mapping for example.
Yap, AFAIK doing a full render is the only way to go… which sucks, but that’s all we have.
hmm, I was really hoping there would be a neat little way to borrow the UI from the mat editor. I guess my ideas are a little far fetched. I will continue on with the rest of the tool sans sphere and hope that I can do something to help illustrate the difference in look between the two materials.
Thanks for the replies guys!
I have different groups built in a max file that I merge depending on what I want to render. Then ensure the group is higher in z than objects.max.z
The object to be materialed is always the first object in the group ( by creating the group with that one object and then appending the rest of the scene ) and gets the material to be rendered.
Merge, Move (if needed), Apply Mat, Render, Delete.