Crazy Homeless Guy Posted March 6, 2008 Share Posted March 6, 2008 We just bought the Dosch 2007 car series. I was thrilled because they came with both a standard materials set, and a Vray materials set. Today is the first day I have had a chance to break them out, and put them into the production pipeline. That is when I discovered my problem. The 2007 vray materials cars are higher geometry resolution than they standard material cars. The file sizes of the cars with Vray materials are 50 to 100 megs depending on the model. The file size of the cars with standard materials is 10-15 megs. The logical solution would be to open the standard material cars, and import the vray materials that they setup, and then simply over writing the materials on the cars. Bing, everything would be done. …but, of course it is just not that easy. The Vray material cars are dropped to polymesh’s and have one sub object material applied to the car. The standard material cars are composed of multiple mesh’s, and multiple sub object materials. Even if I drop them to one mesh, I have multiple copies of the paint material and such. It is really a pain, and I am not sure what the most efficient way to work with these are, does anyone have any solutions? They are really nice models, and the lower poly ones are perfectly suitable for renderings, and proxing around. The higher mesh ones are good if you only have one or two in a scene. I really need a lot more than that many cars in any one given scene. It looks like I am going to have to spend 10 hours, and reset these cars up properly by hand. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Billabong Posted March 6, 2008 Share Posted March 6, 2008 I know a lot of those standard cars have raytraced mats in them, can not just do a vray scene conversion. I know thats a pretty obvious choice, but since you didn't mention it I thought I would Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted March 6, 2008 Author Share Posted March 6, 2008 I have played around with that option, including the VrayMtl Converter v2.5 script. ....but havn't had the luck yet. The grouping polymesh is really bizarre. Not all of the body is grouped together, it is broken up into segments. So ..part of the body is grouped with one thing, part with another. For example, the back bumper, back license plate, and front grill are grouped together. This groupping has its own Multi/Sub-Object material that includes paint for the bumper, chrome for the grill, etc... with the paint for the bumper set to slot 1. The the next grouping has the interior seats, and the running boards. This grouping has its owm Multi/Sub-Object material, which also includes the same color of paint for the bumpers. Only this time the slot number for the paint is 5. Basically no colrelation between the materials. When I first open the car, I can change the paint on anyof the materials, and they are instanced together, so all of the paint changes. Sweet, something is working decently. So then I either do an automated vray material conversion, or a manual vray material conversion, and guess what... the instanced materials between the subobjects are broken, so only paint associated with that material/object change, leaving the rest unchanged. You could say set the paint before I change it, but I need to change it to the Vray mat to give it reflection. The 2007 cars don't have any ratytraced materials, only standard mats, so no reflections. Basically I think I am going to have to completely de-assemble the cars breaking apart the objects, and re-assemble them into something that makes more sense. It just dawned on me in the mean time that I might be able to put a Vray reflection in the standard mat rollout, set the paint to the color I want, then do a global material change. Maybe it would hold a proper reflection then. When the materials are still standard, yo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Billabong Posted March 6, 2008 Share Posted March 6, 2008 I'm sorry man I wish I had more of answer for ya, but it looks as if its going to be a long night for you. I really can't see any other way Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted March 6, 2008 Author Share Posted March 6, 2008 Luckily they don't need to be done tonight. The image I am working on that I wanted them for has a delivery date of next week. I think I am going to search for a script to automate the breakdown of objects to the basics, and then another to unify objects with similar materials or something like that, then I can just collapse into a mesh before writing them to proxies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lambros Posted March 6, 2008 Share Posted March 6, 2008 bought them yesterday and was faced by a huge 500K Prius! I proxied it, added it to my 300+ vrayproxyplants scene and brought the render to its knees. I think will just use the 100K poly standard cars after applying custom vray materials. I dont think it will take more than 3-4 hours, but they should have let us know that fact. Perhaps I will drop them an email... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted March 6, 2008 Share Posted March 6, 2008 Please do because I've had the same problem and because of it I haven't used them yet after purchasing them 3 months ago. We have the 2004 library which was great to work on but this new set of models is just to hard to edit and I don't know why they changed they way they were building them. If you find a way to work on them please let us know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted March 6, 2008 Author Share Posted March 6, 2008 bought them yesterday and was faced by a huge 500K Prius! I proxied it, added it to my 300+ vrayproxyplants scene and brought the render to its knees. I think will just use the 100K poly standard cars after applying custom vray materials. I dont think it will take more than 3-4 hours, but they should have let us know that fact. Perhaps I will drop them an email... ....if you do try to use the 500k models, definitely look at the materials before hand. i am pretty sure some of the subdivisions are up around 50. that will slow a rendering of the car by itself, even with nothing else in the model. you could use the "VRay Automater | V1.0" from sevensheaven.nl to lower the material subdivisions all at once. this should allow the model to render, by i think because of polygon count, it will still be slow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lambros Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 so, I took the time and converted standard lowpoly cars to vray material ones. A bit annoying and tiring job... I just got an answer from Seb Dosch, and he just said that the lowpoly ones are not available with vray materials, so no surprise... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 I just got an answer from Seb Dosch, and he just said that the lowpoly ones are not available with vray materials, so no surprise... My experience with the Vray materials on these cars hasn't been good, I use the physical sky/camera setup and none of the materials seem to work very well. I'd prefer to have a car that has all of it's parts separated with just a standard Max material on them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted March 11, 2008 Author Share Posted March 11, 2008 ….here is what I came up with to make the Dosch 2007 cars usable with Vray (or other specialized engine,) at least usable for myself. - Select everything, and convert it to Editable Poly. - Select one of the editable polies, and attach the rest of the individual poly objects, so that you have one mesh. When you do this, make sure you have ‘Match ID’s to Material’ selected. - Enable Vray or whatever render engine you are going to use. - Your mesh will now have a Multi/Sub Object with about 25 slots. I chose to renumber some of the slots so that my paint material, chrome, aluminum and glass were at the top of the list. When you renumber, you simply highlight the number you want to change, and type it in. Max will warn you that you have multi slots with the same number. Fix it, and sort by number. Right now I am only converting the Paint, Chrome, and aluminum to Vray materials. I am not going to worry about the glass right now, since it has been mentioned that it may need to be recreated. - Scale the car up to the appropriate size. I don’t have the mathmatical number, I have simply drawn lines that represent the length and height of the car base don an internet search, and visually scaled it up to match. - Now save a copy as you base working file for the car, and export a copy to a vray mesh. . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted March 11, 2008 Author Share Posted March 11, 2008 When you renumber, you simply highlight the number you want to change, and type it in. Max will warn you that you have multi slots with the same number. Fix it, and sort by number. Right now I am only converting the Paint, Chrome, and aluminum to Vray materials. I am not going to worry about the glass right now, since it has been mentioned that it may need to be recreated. . scratch that. the renumbering to make it easier finding the materials does not work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BrianKitts Posted March 12, 2008 Share Posted March 12, 2008 I'm facing the same thing cleaning up my new library of cars. (I have the 123d.com arch vis cars instead of Dosch).... but the clean up routine is working pretty well. Explode the car. Attach all the objects. go back in edit mesh mode objects selection. grab all the windows and detach them. select the new glass object add a shell modifier of 1/8" and apply my glass material. Then reattach the glass to the main object. Name the car and it's new material and move on. I agree I wish I could have the mats rearranged easier...specifically the body color in slot 1, but it's just a pain to move a selection, move the material swap ID's by assigning to a bogus number to clear a slot, move the mat in 1 out etc........ just takes too much time and too much chance for error... BTW....the trick of turning the global subdivisions multiplier down to .01 to zero out all material subdivs and then controlling the noise with the image sampler works like a charm when rendering scenes with these cars made of 100 material slots with some vray materials with excessive subdivisions rather that parsing through all the materials to clean them up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted March 12, 2008 Author Share Posted March 12, 2008 I agree I wish I could have the mats rearranged easier...specifically the body color in slot 1, but it's just a pain to move a selection, move the material swap ID's by assigning to a bogus number to clear a slot, move the mat in 1 out etc........ just takes too much time and too much chance for error... I skipped exploding them all because the Dosch cars are broken into about 5 separate Poly Obects. I try to select one of the objects where the body color is in the first slot, and then attach the rest of the object to that one. That seems to keep the body color in the first slot. Where I started to run into problems was when I wanted to bump the glass and chrome up to the 2nd and 3rd slots, and so on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stylEmon Posted March 12, 2008 Share Posted March 12, 2008 i have this collection, but am using the Maya versions. They also have two sets of cars, one using SubD and the other using Polys. I use the Poly library, by the materials where a mess with Maya also. They are all referenced to a specific path, I had to go through and make the paths relative (not absolute). Then I had to change ALL of the TIFF materials to tga. MR in Maya 8.5 has an issue with TIFFs... ? What I really thought was strange is, some of the materials that are referenced where just colors... seems that they could've just used the RGB code rather than reference a color file... So once i got that all ironed out, i had to go through and rename all the brake lites and head lites so there wouldn't be any confilcting names. They named a lot of the files the same thing, even though the images where different. Good models and nice materials.. but a pain to incorp in to work flow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
louis.cho Posted April 29, 2008 Share Posted April 29, 2008 So Dosch and 123d are the same. Is there any 'ready to use' vray cars library? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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