Electric Image Animation System 7 Tutorials
Material Libraries / Material Palette & Collect Files
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Subtitles of the Movie (Electric Image Animation System 7 / Material Libraries / Material Palette & Collect Files)
As you can see, I've made another variation of our wax material and this time I've colored it blue and we're going to save the material again. Let's call it Blue Wax and retrieve it from our library. Now, this time if I wanted to load this material into another object, let's say the second candle, instead of clicking the Load Button, I'm going to go up into the Menu Bar to the Material Menu and select Material Palette. Now a whole new palette opens up and this contains all the materials that we have available in Electric Image. This list is the same as the Material Folder in our Main Electric Image Folder. So another way to assign a material is simply to go to Material in the Material Palette, select it and then drag it to the Material Preview on our model. As you can see, I have several materials. Let's open up some of our categories. Cartoon; there's a few in there. Double click the bottom folder to get back to the root. Glass; we have several glass materials so in order to scroll through it, hold down the Spacebar. Your cursor changes into a hand and just scroll through the material list this way. You can also adjust the icon size in the Material Palette by going to Preferences and click on the Viewer Palette Undo Tab. In the Material Palette Section you can change the style of the palette and also change the icon size. If you have several materials, then these small icons may be much more navigable. Again, click on the material from the Material Palette, drag it to the Material Preview and immediately the material is applied. Of course, you can also change the master material in your project the same way. And now the master has been changed for all the models associated with it. There's a couple things to bear in mind. First of all, the materials that you've created and saved are just recipes for the material look and they don't contain any of the textures or shaders necessary to create the material. For instance, this particular material in the diffuse channel has a shader applied to it. The material that you've assigned from the Material Library does not contain the shader. So the Material Palette simply contains a collection of let's say recipes for various material looks but the ingredients for the recipes, like the shaders or reflection maps and so on, are not embedded into the materials in the Material Palette. So how do you collect the necessary files to make your materials? Again, saving the material simply saves the recipe. Let's say we want to share our project so that other artists can work on it. We want to make sure not only do they have the correct materials, but they also have the correct ingredients, like the shaders and reflections. What you have to do is go up to the Menu Bar, click File and select Collect Files. A new pop-up appears allowing you to collect all the files you want to share or are necessary for backing up your project to be used again. So you can create a Model Folder, Texture, Reflections, Sound, Shader and Plug-Ins. That way you can make sure all the files associated with your project, that includes those files associated with the materials, like textures and reflections, are saved outside of the project. Let's go ahead and click the Collect Button. This is going to ask us to create a new name for our project and we'll just call this Material and I'll save it onto my hard drive and in a moment Electric Image has collected all the files associated with this project and put them into a new folder right here. So any of the shaders or reflections that are being used in this project are saved in this folder. Now, a common mistake when you're first using Electric Image is when you create a master material, you assume that that master material gets saved to the Material Library. It does not. A master material that you created sits inside the project. It is not part of the Material Library. Again, to permanently save this material outside of the project for further use, you have to go to the Info Window, give it a name and click the Save Button. And the newly-created material will appear in the Material Palette here.
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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