August 14, 200718 yr Commercial Member >BTW, as a useful "tip" for cleaning up a project from deleted>and unused Materials...>>Save your scene to an incremented file (use the "+" button>unless you have "Autoincrement" enabled), then click the "New">button to revert to an empty scene. "Merge" your saved scene>file into the empty scene, and only the "active & used">Materials will be present... ;)This brings up a long-standing problem I've always had with Gmax, but never found out how to cure; Is there any way to "re-map" material IDs globally? For example replace every material ID for every object using a given multi-material in the scene. I've got a multi-material using "deactivated" materials and I'd love to wipe those old materials, rearrange the existing slots, and then re-map all th IDs in the scene. Right now the only way I see to do that is on an object-by-object basis by going into sub-object, selecting all the faces by material ID and changing them - for every single object, one at a time. Since I've got such a large number of objects, it wouldn't be trivial. Is there something basic I've missed? Something that would simply allow you to reassign material IDs globally?Edit: A bit unrelated, but I've got a number of materials with specular maps which are just instances of the diffuse map. I seem to remember from way back that these "specular maps" were necessary (FS9) in order to have ANY specularity despite the fact that they're not really specularity maps, just diffuse maps assigned to that channel. I can't help thinking these may be responsible for consuming resources in FS. Are these really necessary and/or do they reduce performance in any way?Thanks,--Jon Jon Blum Vertical Reality Simulations
August 14, 200718 yr Bill,EDIT: I see that I never saw that particular article, but now after having read it, I am beginning to get it. Thanks Bill.
August 14, 200718 yr Author Moderator Unfortunately, there's no "global search and change" for MatIDs. They have to be done manually.As for using the diffuse texture in the specular color slot, that should make no difference at all in the sim's performance. The bitmap is only loaded once, then "copied and blended" before being sent to the video card for final rendering. Fr. Bill AOPA Member: 07141481 AARP Member: 3209010556 Avsim Board of Directors | Avsim Forums Moderator
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