DeleD Community Edition

[vgo]

Why does the material replace dialog show pretty much all materials in the scene as the materials in the selection?

I've working on some models that have 50-100 different materials each and replacing them is pretty much trial and error because I can't actually see what materials are assigned to different objects/faces. The problem is that these are imported models in 3DS format and DeleD doesn't seem to be able to load the textures for the models, so I have to manually assign every single one...

Also, there's a bug in the material editor: Click on material and set it's type to texture, set the texture too. Then click on the next material which has the type set to color, click on the preview to change the color, click ok and you get "cannot open file ...\FF808080" which to me looks like a memory address. The problem is in the Type radiobox, when it shows color, it's actually at texture which has the frame on it....

[Paul-Jan]

Ah, that's 3 very useful comments in one post, thanks!

1) About the replace material editor showing all materials as used materials: you are right, seems to be a bug. We'll have to look into it.

2) About the 3DS importer not importing the textures of those models: would you mind sending me (paul [at] delgine [dot] com) one of those models so I can make it load them properly? The 3DS importer is supposed to be pretty flexible there. I'll happily agree to any non-disclose agreements you want...

3) Good job spotting this one and describing the steps in such detail! Will get it fixed. By the way, the strange code is the hexadecimal representation of the color.

[vgo]

Turned out that there was no texture information in those 3ds files...

Another thing about the material editor, it should "remember" the last used materials/categories/folders. When working with the materials a lot it's a real pain in the ass when you have to select the category/folder and scroll down the list all the time... Also it doesn't seem to understand subfolders in the texture folders, in fact the whole material browser is very cumbersome to use in the first place... A sort of hierarchical display would be a lot better (like the treeview in Windows Explorer).

[Starnick]

[Paul-Jan]

There is a whole thread about this somewhere. The reason why we didn't use a treeview at the time is because many many people are notoriously bad with them. Note how I am not saying a treeview wouldn't be a better solution than the current one, I'm just explaining our initial choice.

The Material Editor is up for a major revision at some point in the not too distant feature. A treeview will very probably be part of that, as will be some sort of persistence of the current selection (it should probably be Material Editor -> Material Picker -> Material Editor, as you very often want to edit the material currently selected in the picker). Suggestions like these are most welcome!

[vgo]

Ok, guess I just have to live with the current system... It's just a bit silly because I have something like 100 texture folders, many of them for just one particular object (and this is exactly how the importers work too, they always create a new texture folder). Logical would be to have a folder "Vehicles" and then under that "cars" and under them folders for each vehicle, this is how I've arranged the textures in my game engine and would love to do it in DeleD too...

But I have another question... Why does the optimize command mess up the texture coordinates? It should be able to preserve them, right?

[Jeroen]

[Paul-Jan]

Well, as I am one of those people, and you are busy working on other stuff, it's on the top of my post 1.71 list. Seriously.