Material Presets
jmucchiello
Posts: 2,509
I have a figure with several geoshells. I want to save all the material settings for the shells at once and then apply them to other figures with the same shells.
Save As... Material Preset... only saves on object's materials at a time.
Save As... Hierarchical Material Preset... doesn't work on geoshells because they have no rigging.
Save As... Scene Subset... recreates the geoshells. And forgets the materials since the shells aren't automatically linked to any target on load.
Is saving each geoshell's materials separately the only way?
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Comments
Saving as H. Material Preset should work with geoshells as this save filter doesn't require the sub-nodes are rigged ~~
I'm clicking more than one geoshell at once. That's the scenario I'm asking about. I want to know if there's a way not to need to go through all the shells separately.
For a Hierachical Materials preset, you only need to select the parent node. The ensuing dialog will let you select which child nodes to include.
Well, you said "Save As... Hierarchical Material Preset... doesn't work on geoshells because they have no rigging." I clarified that H. Mat Preset works for geoshells ~
Just like saving material presets of other items under a figure, with H.Mat Preset, Uncheck All firstly, then check the geoshell nodes you wanna save.
I was selecting the shell in the scene panel. Not the base figure. In my scenario it fails. And I didn't think about starting from the figure.
If you do what I did, the response is:
This is probably the first time I'm attempting to make an H Mat. And that error didn't make sense. Now it does.
Oh~, yep, I got the same message.
To use H.Mat Preset, you have to 1stly select a node with a hierarchy.
The idea behind a hierarchical pose or material preset is that it will save a combined preset for a figure and items parented to said figure. So you need to select the parent figure when saving or applying a hierarchical preset, as it's the root of the hierarchy.
It isn't intuitive that if you want to save something you don't click on it. In fact, if it worked how I thought it did, the little popup window where you choose what goes into the preset wouldn't be necessary. It is also disappointing that you can't exclude individual surfaces from the preset.
But you can apply the H.Mat Preset to the selected Surfaces by Ctrl + Apply.
Someone needs to make a page that just says what happens when you hold down Ctrl when clicking stuff in DS.
Try it with any preset (lights, cameras, materials, poses, shaping, expressions, etc.). You get a preset load options dialog to tailor the application.
It was 16-18 months into my Daz journey before I found out about ctrl clicking the little eye icon to hide all the subcomponents of an object in a scene. I wonder what else I don't know about.
There are a bunch of Viewport modifier key functions at the bottom of the Customize Daz Studio dialog (F3).
There's at least one thread full of "Features I wish I had known about sooner".