Hi Michael ...

No, I am not doing any modifying in SimLab.

I did not see the .mtl files and will look again but I think I see a simple solution:

If I keep all of a material type in a style and then before exporting turn off all the other styles I can then select everything on that layer and assign it the same object name. Or so it seems from a quick experiment.

I think that SimLab will then assign a single material to that 'object' even if there are many iterations of that. I have not tried this but will soon.

Until now I have been opening my drawings in Rhino and then rendering with Flamingo which assigns materials by 'layer' (which more or less corresponds to MoI 'styles')

I have been looking for a simple way to reduce the number of programs I have to use to get results ... The MoI/SimLab combo looks like it makes for a reasonably simple and inexpensive solution.

At the moment my brain and my computer are both swollen with too many options. :)

cheers,
eric

Hi eric, if you do not see .mtl files, you might check if that's been turned off in MoI under Options > Import/Export > OBJ options > "Write material assignments" and "Write .mtl file".

Make sure both of those are enabled to get the full material definitions to be exported to OBJ format:



- Michael

ALso, MoI Styles = Simlab materials, and simlab has a material manager. So if you just want to use the styles, then you would use the material manager in simlab. I thought you were talking about the tree.

Thanks Michael and BurrMan ...

Now I should be able to work my way through ...

I'll give it a try tomorrow.

eric

Hi eric, so to get to the materials list in SimLab like Burr is talking about, go to the Materials menu at the top of the window and pick "Manage Scene Materials". Then the "Scene materials" panel will pop up and it will have a list of materials in it which will match the styles list that you had in MoI.

Then to edit any material, make sure the properties pane is open and click on the material and you can change the material's property. If you do it that way you should be able to retain your styles/layers structure that you had in MoI and not need to worry about the object names at all, that's a separate channel of organization information from the materials list.

Hopefully that all makes sense.

- Michael

Just for a little more info, I think what Eric was refering to is the actual geometry parts in simlab not being assigned any type of name, per the import



Simlab is assigning it's own tree parent elements the names, etc. I havnt follwed through enough to discover if there is any benefit to assigning this portion of the objects names based off of the import, though it would be a simlab request to deal with it.

Because its animation and rigging, those elements would be restructured in the parent/child relationship anyway, and then you would be assigning the geo elements a name for that, based on the restructure. So they would need "renamed" anyway?

Anyway, Maybe we'll ask in the simlab forum their reasoning for this import convention.

Hi Burr, what I thought eric was asking about was that he was expecting to see the styles list in that same "Object tree" panel and didn't know that you had to go to a whole different panel (the materials one) to see them instead... From your help I think he's probably got enough information now.

- Michael

Hi Michael and BurrMan

Yes, I played with it yesterday and with your helpful suggestions can now easily make and identify all the materials of the same style as a group and render them properly.

Thanks for your help with this.

cheers,
eric