Loading .mxm files

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Hannes Löschke on April 14, 2012 at 4:45am

Scarab doesn't load MXMs directly, because that would involve to recreate something like Maxwells Database Manager. But you can get a list of all the Maxwell materials currently loaded in your scene with the MaterialList component. Just load Materials like you would for normal Rhino texturing. Those Materials can be applied directly or modified with Scarab.

If you want to modify a Material, you "create a new one" with the same name. When Scarab finds an existing material with the name you request to create, it overwrites the existing one instead of creating a new one. This is because Maxwell creates an additional RhinoMaterial, that lives on after deleting the Maxwell material. After a few iterations you would drown in RhinoMaterials.

Scarab isn't capable of handling multiple layers yet. But all modifications are done on a single layer named "Base". Thanks to some tipps from Jeremy at NextLimit, all other existing layers in the material remain untouched. So you can manually load MXMs into Rhino. Just make sure the layer you want to modify with Scarab is called "Base" and layers that should remain untouched are called something else.

On a side note: Altough they are called "Texture Slots", you can also plug simple colors in there. The texture slot represents the strip you see in the MXM Editor. In the Editor you can define a color and a texture for, say Diffuse0. There's a toggle telling Maxwell to use either the color or the texture. Since Scarab is creating the material the tooggle makes no sense. You just use either a color or texture, depending on what you want to create.

Permalink Reply by Julien Ybert on April 14, 2012 at 12:45pm

Thank you Hannes for such a quick and detailed answer!

I think I understand better how does the plugin work.

j.