Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Art sculpts - import vismat
A very useful option when texturing with V-Ray and one that can speed up the textur-
ing process quite a bit is the ability to use, or maybe we should say reuse, the already
existing V-Ray materials in the form of V-Ray's own
.vrmat
and
.vismat
applica-
tion agnostic material types.
Note
As Chaos Group have announced that the
.vrmat
format will be included in both
3ds Max and Maya with the release of V-Ray 3.0, the possibilities of acquiring
readymade, high-quality materials in this manner will only grow.
One brilliant thing about this format is that regardless of where it came from, the pro-
cess of loading a vismat material is always the same. All we need to do is perform the
following steps:
1. Create a new
Standard
material in the editor and call it
Sculpts
.
2. Right-click on the
Sculpts
material entry, and from the menu, choose the
Im-
port Material
command.
3. In the dialog box, browse to the
Exercise Files
|
Textures
|
Vismat
|
Sculpts
folder and select the
Ceramic_Sculpts.vismat
file.
4. From the
Window
menu, select the
Layers
command, and in the Layer's dia-
log box, turn off or hide the
Display_Glass
layer and turn on the
Sculpts
lay-
er.
5. Select all five sculpt objects in the scene and then right-click on the
Sculpts
material and use the
Apply Material to Selection
command.
And that's all there is when it comes to using a saved
.vrmat
or
.vismat
material. In
this instance, the
Sculpts
folder was created from the extracted Vismat Zip archive.
So, it contains both the
.vismat
material definition file along with its saved bitmap
preview. The Zip archive itself was created by using the
Pack Material
function, which
can be accessed by right-clicking on the material in the editor list.
As the
.vismat
file contains all of the relevant material settings, there really is noth-
ing else for us to do other than checking out what our new material looks like.
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