Convert Legacy AR Material Library

[Kimble van der Steen]

I missed the first 30 minutes of the webinar.  Good stuff by the way.  My question is when I go to convert my legacy AR material library, I open up a file and there isn't anything there.  what am I doing incorrectly?

 

Thanks

 

Kimble

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

The wiki info on doing this is here.

 

Basically, after you run the conversion tool, you should see a folder by the same name as the original material libs with .ArMaterial files in it.  Are you saying that you see a folder but no files?

[Kimble van der Steen]

Yes, Roy I have been following the wiki info but to no avail.  Not sure whats going on.  I even used the options to have my materials located and it doesn't work.  When I use the legacy conversion I open up the file say "cultured stone" and there is nothing there for the conversion to work.  So yes there aren't any materials in the folder I am choosing.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I still can't quite tell what's happening here.  Make sure you're not saying file, when you really mean folder.

 

When you run the convertor, you are prompted to open a .mlib file.  Once you get to that point, nXt will process it and return.  Have you done that already?

 

Once you've done that, you should be able to go to the materials tab and select the Get Material from File... button at which point you should be able to navigate to the folder created by the convertor, and find some material files.

[Kimble van der Steen]

"When you run the converter, you are prompted to open a .mlib file."

Yes but there isn't a material visible.  Even though the folder has many materials in it, they don't show up for me to click on a material to convert.  In "my documents" folder I have a folder called "materials".  In this folder I have several sub-folders containing different materials.  These are materials I have collected through the years.  The converter is asking for an ES_accurender_material_library.  Do I need to put my "materials" folder in a different location?  My materials are jpegs also if this helps.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Ar3 and ar4 do not have individual material files!  They only have library files (*.mlib).  The source of your confusion is probably that thing under My Computer called "AccuRender Libraries".  Don't use this-- it was an area added to make these .mlib files appear to be folders and files-- they aren't.

 

Search for *.mlib using explorer instead to find where the files actually are.  They may be in Program Files\common files\mcneel shared or some such-- I can't remember right now.

 

The convertor tool takes an mlib and converts everything in it to standard files (.ArMaterial) and folders which can be used directly by nXt.