Problems with bump/displacement after using Polygon Group tool...

Techyman

I've been working on setting up new material zones on a very complex model using the Polygon Grouping tool. The model has been UV mapped. Displacement and bump work great on some areas, but not the ones that I used the PG tool on. Does selecting polygons and setting up a new surface area disrupt the UV's in that area? If it does, is there some way to correct the problem without losing the new areas?

Thanks in advance!

Richard Haseltine

It shouldn't, but you will have to reapply materials. Of course if the new surface includes polygons from two old surfaces that took different maps and had overlapping UVs you will get oddities, but that should be the only risk I cans ee.

Szark

Not that I have seen. Every new zone I have made takes the UVmapping info and translates it. Are some mats Tiled? You do know once a new surfaces is made you will have to set up the maps manually, down to the negative and postive values of the bump and displacement.

Wilmap

If you've added new surfaces, then the old material won't be able to apply the original settings to that surface.

Ie: If the original surface was fabric, and you added a new material zone which had part of this zone and then called it something else, then the preset wouldn't know where to add your displacement etc.

Does that make sense?

Techyman

After I created the new area, I went back and reset everything manually. I am using the same mat settings and maps on another area and they work great. I manually loaded the maps, adjusted the settings (diffuse, ambient, reflect, etc) including the bump and displacement settings. Area one works great, but I haven't made any changes to the polygons in that area. Area two shows the change in the color settings (diffuse, ambient, etc.) but none of the maps seem to load.

Here is what I can see: Area One has a green color with a diamond pattern map. I loaded the map in into bump and displacement and adjusted the settings. I also loaded the map into the diffuse so that I could see the 2D on the preview. This made adjusting the tiling much easier.

Area Two was created from a larger surface using the Polygon grouping tool. I had saved the material settings from Area One and loaded applied them to Area Two. The color of Area Two changed, but the I could not see the diffuse pattern in preview and the render showed Area Two as having the right color, but no bump/displacement. I went back and manually set the material properties for Area Two and made sure the right maps were loaded. I have tried adjusting the tiling (thinking that somehow DS had mad the map too big or two small), the max and min on bump and displacement, but all I get is a smooth object in the render.

Is is possible that somehow the polygons got reversed on this area?

I have 4 other areas that I set up off the main model. I tried the material on all of them. 2 worked great and 2 had the same problem as Area Two: Great color, but no map or displacement...

I'm going to take a short break now to get some asprin for the headache I got from pounding my head against my keyboard...

Hope to hear from you soon...

Thanks

Richard Haseltine

Why not use the copy selected surface/paste to selected surfaces commands from the Surfaces pane option menu, copying from the surface that the new surface originally belonged to? That should control for differences in the UV group.

Techyman

After some more experimentation and some tests on another model, I have come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with the polygons on the original model. I did not create the model, it was a freebie from another site. It's a great model, but it lacks some details that I had hoped to add.

Thanks for all of the great suggestions and help!