mat to vismat converter? status?

[Free Agent_cg]

is there any progress on a converter? will there be? is there? chicken or fish?

its a shame i cant use all those mats at vraymaterials.de without turning on my combersome (although incredably efficient once u get the hang of it) 3d studio max.

ramble ramble ramble

[dalomar_cg]

Re: mat to vismat converter? status?

Right now the converter has gotten no attention for several reasons...

1) until there are more common textures and materials between vfmax and vfR/SU, then there's no point. At best we transfer images and that leads a lot of those materials "out in the cold". Once we have more of these textures and materials it makes the converter more reliable

2) the version of Max changes about every 6 months. Since most of you were relying on the trial version of Max to get these things converted it makes it more and more of a hassle to try and stay current with build that is out there. For us that's development time better spent on VfR/SU

3) the material system is getting overhauled...additional textures, material types, formats, structures. All of the details about those changes haven't been ironed out yet, so making a converter that doesn't fit into that system when we know its just around the corner doesn't make too much sense to us here.

4) No offense to the ones that are using the converter, but the response to it was not as strong as we would have liked to see. We had people get excited, but then they found out that they had to download Max and VfMax for "just this one material"...and then a decent amount of the time, those materials wouldn't convert for reasons stated in number 1. The hope was that a few people who had a material library and had a Max setup would convert some of the materials that the had or had downloaded and upload them for the rest of you, but that never really happened either.

So as far as plans go, I don't think we really have any at the moment. Right now I have no interest in taking development time away from our actual software. A lot of the things that are being done are greatly going to help our material system later on, including the ability for us to make a lot more materials for you guys. We'll see what happens once the next versions get released and we'll see how it goes from there.

One last thing here that I forgot to add that slips through the cracks on this issue. There are no format details out there for Max's material format. What this means is that there's nothing telling us what's what and where things are. There are two options...reverse engineer the formats, which is very tedious, extremely prone to format variations (at last count there would be about 8 or 9 possible versions to reverse engineer), and would most likely be extremely buggy. The other option is to load the file up in Max and just read the values from the actual Max interface and write our format from that. Thats the reason why Max and VfMax are required to do the conversion...we just wouldn't be able to do it any other way.

[Free Agent_cg]

Re: mat to vismat converter? status?

k...

[dalomar_cg]

Re: mat to vismat converter? status?

I was expecting a reply of more than a letter ;D

[Free Agent_cg]

Re: mat to vismat converter? status?

it is more than one letter, theres an elipses

[dalomar_cg]

Re: mat to vismat converter? status?

No no...there's more than one character, but only one letter (unless those count as braille). I'm also not sure how elliptical those are. On my screen they're only appearing as a pixel or two. Maybe rectangular??? ;D

[thomthom]

Re: mat to vismat converter? status?

it is more than one letter, theres an elipses

hm… technically they are periods making up and ellipsis. And ellipsis have their own character code…

sorry, typoholic…

[Free Agent_cg]

Re: mat to vismat converter? status?

theres 3 pixels (assuming a period is made up of one pixel) and its still more than just one letter, its a letter and an ellipses (made up of 3 dots indicating an omission).

[OzBoz]

Re: mat to vismat converter? status?

Well dalomar I read your reply and it sounds reasonable. Then again, I sometimes go to the repository for materials. Being there feels pretty useless since there are only a few with example images.

I think an example image has to mandatory if you want to upload your own material. Having to download f.e. 6 brick walls, render them and see you don't like none of them is time consuming. Isn't there a trainee overthere who would love to create example images for every material?

For me it would make the repository more usefull anyway.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: mat to vismat converter? status?

The material repository is getting a custom solution (we've got a web company working on it for us) and it will have a thumbnail for each and should have a way to download the whole collection at once.

[OzBoz]

Re: mat to vismat converter? status?

The material repository is getting a custom solution (we've got a web company working on it for us) and it will have a thumbnail for each and should have a way to download the whole collection at once.

I'm really glad to hear that! Nice!