Electric Image Animation System 7 Tutorials
Material Libraries / Master Materials
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Subtitles of the Movie (Electric Image Animation System 7 / Material Libraries / Master Materials)
Let's say you've been working on your project and you created a material that you really like and you want to use for other objects in your scene. Let's pretend that we have a scene with a hundred of these candles but the only candle we've been working on so far is this one in the center and that's the material we want to share with all the other objects, this red colored wax. Now, we could, let's go its Material Window, we could simply Copy and Paste material by clicking on the Preview Ball and copying that and then selecting the others and pasting but there's a better way of doing this and that's by creating a Master Material. At the top of the Material Window there's a button that says Create New Master. Let's go ahead and click on that and we'll call this Red Wax and click OK. Now take a look at the top of our Project Window. There's a new icon, a Material Icon with the words Red Wax. That's our new master material. That material will stay with the project and you can assign this material to any of the objects in your scene. Let's say for the sake of argument that we really do have a hundred of these candles and scrolling through the project list and selecting all of them will be kind of a pain so I'm not going to do that. But they all have the same label colors. What we'll do is go back up to the Menu Bar, click Select, By Label and pick the appropriate color and that selects all the other candles. Now let's take a look at the Toolbar. Down here is an icon that looks a lot like a Material Ball Preview linked to the master material. Also at the top of the Project Window in the Mini Toolbar there's a Mini Icon that does the same thing. This mini tool linked to master material. Let's click on that. An alert shows up telling us to select a new master material and we'll select the only one that we have, this Red Wax material we just made. Now that we have assigned our master material to these duplicate candles, I want to take a look at one of these duplicates in its material window. Notice the Title Bar. It doesn't say the name of the model. It says Red Wax Material or the name of our master material. If I click on the original candle, then the Material Window reflects the name of the object the material is assigned to. Let's click on the other candle, the third candle. Again, we see Red Wax Material. I want to point out an important difference between looking at textures in a master material versus looking at material assigned to a specific object. If we click on the Reflectivity Tab, we have a bitmap texture. And I'll double click on that and there's our Texture Preview Pane but we don't see the model. That's because a master material doesn't know what kind of model it's being assigned to. I could be a candle, it could be a column, it could be a sphere, it could be anything. Because it's not necessarily assigned to a specific shape, it doesn't show you any kind of model in the Texture Preview. But if we look at the original candle in its Reflectivity Tab and look at its texture, we can clearly see how the map's being applied to this particular model. So don't let that confuse you. Once you set up a material that you really like, you know how it's going to be applied to any model. So then feel free to create a master material just realizing you won't be able to see the texture mapping previewed in the Master Material Texture Windows. Electric Image maintains a link between the original source of the material and the master material. So if I make a change here, I can update the master by clicking on this button. Or I can go to the master material, Red Wax, there we go and make a change on the master material and now you can click an Update Button here or go back to the original material and say Reload from Master. So there's a two-way link here between this original material and the master material that was derived from it. Also, I want to draw your attention to the tool next to the Link to Master Material and that is the Unlink Tool. So we can select any object and click the Unlink Tool and we no longer have a link between Candle 1 and the master material and I'll do that again for another object. Click the Unlink Tool or there's a mini tool that also unlinks in the Project Window. Click Unlink and now that object is no longer linked to the master material. Any changes we make to the master material will not be reflected in any object that's not linked to it. So only this candle turned green. The others were left alone.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Electric Image Animation System 7 |
| Author: | Scott Simmons |
| SKU: | 33996 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-45-9 |
| Release Date: | 2009-06-01 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 102 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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