Convert AR Legacy Material Library Issues

[Jeff Waymack]

Greetings,

I have been previously using AR4 and just upgraded to the latest version of nXt. I have numberous material libraries that I hope to be able to use.

I translated two of them and noticed that the texture maps in all the materials had been stripped out. When I look at the material properties the tab for texture properties is empty. I would have hoped that at least the path to where the texture map used to be would be showing.

I have developed a great number of materials over the past years and it would take quite a while just to figure out how I originally done them.

Any suggestions on how to either improve the conversion process or figure out what the path and texture map that was originally used?

Thanks,

Jeff

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

A lot of this does happen automatically (or did, most folks are long past this point.) Pathed textures and search paths usually survive.  Changing machines etc. can complicate the process somewhat.  You may have to locate your textures (perhaps with ar4), collect them, and manually add the search paths, before running the lib conversion stuff again.  tga files are no longer supported, so these may need to be converted.  

http://wiki.mcneel.com/accurender/nxt/documentation/basic/convertle...

[Jeff Waymack]

Hi Roy,

I am running Windows 7 Pro 64bit and was not successful in installing the copy of AR4 on my HP workstation. That's why I upgraded to nXt. So I am not sure how I would locate the textures with AR4.

Does nXt search a particular location when doing the translation? If there is a set location, I could dump all my bitmaps in that folder.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

You can add as many search paths as you like.  It's that little hammer and screwdriver picture next to the help button.  

You'll want to re-run the lib conversion utility after you move the bitmaps.  I would probably delete the ones from the previous run and start clean.

[Jeff Waymack]

Hi Roy,

If I create a search path and then move the bitmaps to that location, is that where nXt will look during the translation?

Jeff

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

It should, yes.

[Jeff Waymack]

Hi Roy,

I tried moving all my images to four different folders in C:\Program Files\AccuRender nXt\Support\Images. I deleted the previous library the translator had created as you suggested and rebuilt it. After spending some time going through all the materials I noticed the following...

1) When the translator finds a texture map for a material it may list it as "linked and embedded" in the nXt Material Editor under the tab Texture Maps. The path for the material is shown. But when I click on the image representing the texture map the editor looks in the folder created by the translator for the library. I would think since the path to the texture map is known, the program would use that path.

2) Sometimes the texture map is found, but the path is not shown. In this case the texture map is shown as "embedded" only. I'm not sure why sometimes the link is shown and other times not.

3) There are still a number of materials that I know have texture maps in them that are lost during the translation. I was extremely thorough at moving all the texture maps I have ever used into the newly created folders that have been set as search paths in nXt. Currently in the four folders there are roughly 3,300 texture maps.

If I look in the original library file (*.mlib) I can see occasional paths to the texture maps. Since most of the file is unreadable to me, I can't figure out which materials are using those texture maps.

I would really like to be able to be productive with nXt since the older Accurender programs don't seem to run on my Windows 7 64bit operating system. You had suggested in might try to figure out materials using AR4, but it looks like I would have to go back to my older workstation to do that. This seems almost as time consuming as recreating the materials again except that I don't recall how I did many of them (they took some trial and error to get right).

Any suggestions or work arounds would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I really don't have anything else to try.  Most folks with large material libs are years away from this transition.  It was always easier when nXt was installed on the same machine as ar4-- the registry search paths for ar4 could be read by nXt directly and conversion usually went a little smoother.  Some remaining materials were typically cranky and did require manual work.  Some will not translate, due to differences in formatting.  tga, for example, is not supported.

Be aware that the rendering engines have changed so much from the ar4 days that you're very likely going to have to tweak your materials anyway.   Perfect materials in ar4 may only be approximations in nXt.  nXt was never really framed as an update to ar4.  It's a new product that can read much, but not all, of the old data.

[Jeff Waymack]

Hi Roy,

Thanks for the information. Particularly the part about the significant differences in the rendering engines. I was noticing that some of the materials w/ texture maps that came through didn't look quite right.

Are there standard libraries that are available for nXt that could be used as a starting point? It looks like that might be the best route rather than trying to modify something that just doesn't look right anymore.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

There's a content and entourage section in the download menu with some libraries.  Accustudio has some as well, I believe.