Importing Saved Rhino Materials

Rhino Rhino for Windows
1

I’m working with some Rhino files that have been modelled & mapped by someone else, and I have the .3dm files as well as the .rmtl files. However, all the materials in the Material Editor are giving me a blank white thumbnail, so I tried to import the .rmtl files that I had. There was no change afterwards though.

Forgive me if this is an extremely basic question, since this is my first time using Rhino and I want to double check it’s not an error on my part. Is the problem here that I’m missing a step in this process of relinking materials, or have the actual textures been lost? Do I need additional texture files? As a further note, when I look at the materials in explorer and try to extract embedded files from them, it also tells me that there are no embedded files to extract, so there’s that.

2

When a 3dm file is saved, the textures in any materials or environments will need to be embedded for them to travel with the file to another computer. You can do this in the Save As dialog by checking “save textures” or set the option to do so in Options>Document Properties>Rendering. When saving an rmtl file from the material editor, there is a prompt that asks if you’d like to embed the textures. It sounds like neither of these options was used when the files were saved. I’d ask the creator of the file to resave them using one of these techniques or have them send you all the textures separately, Rhino should automatically find them if they are in the same directory as the 3dm on your machine.