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[Old Codger]

I have a question regarding use of and application of textures and materials which will pretty much be a deal breaker for me. By that I mean that I may have to abandon Anim8or all together in favor of another 3D modeller. Hopefully you guys can provide me with an answer which will allow me to keep using Steven's marvelous toy.

Materials: Is it possible to apply multiple materials to a single object? If so, please sketch (in words) how to do so. I NEED to be able to do that or if not to do complex things with textures to achieve the same visual result.

Textures: Where in the process of creating a 3D model do textures come in? I need to be able to apply different textures to different parts of a model. Right now I am not seeing how to apply textures at all. I know I do not know near enough to do what I want to be able to do with 3D models but I KNOW that at some point I am going to have to be able to apply different textures to different parts of a model. My instinct tells me it ought to be possible. But for the life of me I cannot see how. In Flight Simulator Design Studio I could select several contiguous faces (FSDS called them "polys") select a texture file and even narrow it down to a portion of the referenced texture file and the portion of the texture file would show up on the model as if it were painted on those faces. Can I do something comparable in Anim8or? If not then I'm going to have to abandon Anim8or because I know what I need to be able to do (even if I do not know how to actually do it) and will have to find a modelling program that will let me do it.

Anybody know how to do what I have to do? I promise that I have read everything in both versions of the manual plus the overview and it still is not clicking for me. I have so very much time invested in Anim8or that it makes me sick to think about abandoning it but if I cannot do what I need to be able to do . . .

[AlecJames]

Create a cube. Convert to Mesh. Switch to point edit mode. Create a material, call it red and make it red.  Select the front face of the cube and apply the material to it. Create a material, call it blue and make it blue.  Select the top face of the cube and apply the material to it.

You now have a cube with 3 materials, the default, red and blue.

Textures are used to make materials.  In the simplest form a material is a solid colour.  You can also select a png file as a texture for a material property.  The most common thing I do is to select an image for the diffuse property of the material.  If you have a picture that you want to paste onto the cube face, in materials, click textures, click ... next to diffuse, click "load texture", select your image file, it appears in the list. Click the texture name in the list of textures to select it then click OK.  Then repeat the texture selection (you don't need to load it this time because its loaded already) for the ambient property of the material.  Apply the material to a cube face and it appears that the image is pasted onto the cube face.

Once you've done above try -
In the UV editor (click the UV button), you can move and scale the image on the side of the cube. 

Once you've done above try -
You can save the object as an obj file, and import it into a UV mapping program like Roadkill or UV mapper (@all are there better tools today?)  UV mapping allows you to apply a single image to the whole object and precisely control which part of the image is on which face.

Good luck and let me know how you get on....

[RudySchneider]

A simplistic answer is, "Yes, you can do pretty much anything" you want to do in Anim8or, though it may sometimes be a bit more work, especially when you are new (as with any application).  For instance, here's a real quick cube I made with several panels of different colors, and two panels with JPEG images as textures.

[ENSONIQ5]

To summarise the steps in creating and applying basic materials:

• Click the Materials icon in the top bar (looks like 4 balls) to open the materials panel
• You have two panels to choose from, File and Object.  Materials created in File are available for all objects, materials in Object are only available for the specific object *
• Double click the empty material slot titled 'New' to open the material editor.  There's more to this editor than I can cover here, the manual covers it better than I can, but to start with use the colour selector to choose a basic colour in the Ambient and Diffuse channels, eg. red.  Click OK and your red material should show at the top of the materials panel
• To create a second material, double click the 'New' slot and do the same process as above
• In Object/Edit mode (arrow at top left of the toolbox), click the object, then click the colour slot you want, then click 'Apply' at the top of the materials panel.  This will apply that material to the whole object
• To apply your second colour to just one face, change to Object/Point edit mode (3 dots in toolbox), ensure Face select is selected in the toolbox below XYZ, ensure 'Front' is selected in the row below that, and click on the face whose material you want to change. As before, click the material you want in the materials panel and click Apply to apply that colour to just the selected face

Obviously you can select multiple faces to apply the second colour to as required.  UV mapping in Anim8or is quite powerful and easy to control but needs a bit more explanation, we can cover this once you have the gist of creating and applying materials.  I attempted to create a video but my screen capture software is prehistoric and the resolution is terrible, and W10's Game Bar capture software doesn't seem to capture pop-up menus, annoyingly.

* Copying and pasting a mesh from one Object to another Object within the same project also copies any object-specific materials it uses into the new object.  Since this can get a bit messy with duplicates if (like me) you tend to build meshes in one Object and assemble them in another, I normally use the 'File' panel pretty much exclusively.

[Old Codger]

Rudy (or anyone),
In what view/mode was that illustration you provided? I can (apparently) reliably assign materials to whatever faces I select and I can also put textures into a material as either decals or bump maps and the texture illustration appears to show it properly. But when I actually apply a material with a texture in it, the base color of the material changes a tad but the graphics on the texture fail to appear. What do I need to do to see those textures? Got the texture loaded and selected and mode set to decal but nothing shows up.

Texture: 512 x 512 pixels, black graphics on white background
Object: 20 unit cube with simple faces approx. 18 x 18 units

What am I missing? My gut says I'm missing some small detail. Here is my cube (I rounded the corners/edges before merging faces) "before" with just black (as default materials) and grey (to selected faces) materials applied and "after" with the attached .gif set as decal. I know the devil is in the details and the devil is biting me in the butt for real.

[Steve]

For textures to appear the fces need texture coordinates. When you make a cube with the Cube tool it applys coordinates to the faces, which are preserved if you convert it to a mesh with Build->ConvertToMesh. But only the front and back have coordinates that would show your image as you probably want. Here's a simple example:

[Old Codger]

Thanks, Steve. Now, is there any way - currently - to remap face coordinates? Because I start with a cube and then move edge loops around - a lot - to get the geometry I need in order to do what I want next which is to round all the corners and edges. I keep working until I get the over-all shape I want. I merge faces, extrude faces even sometimes join faces. When I get the shape right then I go to work with materials. Got that down. Found the "Apply" button (flat forehead moment there lol ). But I then need to apply an entire texture as a decal to a specific (currently existing) face. Short of grabbing a UV tool (Such as UVMapper) to give me the over all mapping and using (as the thread referenced in another question of mine) photoshop to put the decal I want onto the precise area of the original model?

[ENSONIQ5]

In the Edit mode toolbox, just above the Shapes section is the UV function.  Select your object, select UV, and use the different mouse buttons to scale, rotate & move the UV coords.  A yellow grid reticule overlay shows what's going on.  Double click to open a dialog to change the mapping geometry or reset the UV coords to the default.  The process is identical for individual selected faces via the UV tool in the Point edit toolbox.

For more complex UV mapping there are a bunch of external UV mappers capable of 'flattening' complex meshes to create UV maps, I personally use Lithunwrap.

[Old Codger]

Thanks, ENSONIQ5, I found and downloaded the free version for later install.

Problem is Anim8or is acting up on me. Once it flat out crashed - no error message, no nothing just popped like a soap bubble with even less trace. Also having problems generating a spline from a part of a mesh (cutting a cylinder down into a single edge/point loop, converting that into a spline) and then doing a lathing. Half the time it seems to accept the command (the menu item is not greyed out) but no spline appears.

The big thing is Anim8or lost several hours of work. Poof! I had everything saved (doing that religiously now) and went into the scene creator to compose a shot of what I had done. I composed the shot I wanted, rendered it and saved the render. When I pulled the render up in PSE I realized I hadn't changed the image size. So I went back into Ani to recompose the shot with an eye towards saving it as a larger image. Only the object I made before the crash along with the global materials I made up before even starting any objects were there. I remember what I did to get there and can easily recreate the work and in fairly quick time. It just hurt like heck to lose the work. You know?

Anyhow, I figure I better let Mr. G know about the issues I'm having most especially Anim8or just quitting on me. It did that once before while I was trying to build a spline from segments.