Material mapping questions

Several Material questions here that may just be my brain not coming back with the rest of my me from vacation last week.

I am trying to pop out a rough draft of a render and figured I would use the Mac Rhino render in the WIP version to get something quick. But now after dorking around with Mac Rhino that quickness has gone out the window and now I just determined to figure it out.

  1. Assigning materials by layer. I have inherited a big pile of a mess file that is full of left over materials that are somehow assigned by layer. I can click on the material icon in the layers palette and it opens the little window to edit the material, but I don’t want to edit the material, I would like to assign it another material that I have already made. But there does not seem to be an option. Is there a way to do this? All I can do is edit the currently assigned layer.

  2. I have a surface. I have made a material for cedar shingles. When I apply the material it comes out right on some surfaces, but rotated 90 on others, or the different scales. I know there are complex reasons for this, but I would really just like to spin or size the material per plane. There aren’t that many surfaces. If I pick custom, it tries to step me through a bunch of hoops picking things in the model that don’t make sense to me and then ends making the shingles look like a ‘Fata Morgana’ effect. (Google it. It’s cool.) There is even this ‘rotation’ setting that is kindly grayed out when looking at the texture mapping of the material.

  3. Anyone come up with a simple easy way to get a nice sunlight effect with shadows in Mac Rhino yet? When I swap to working on the final render I will be in Maxwell which does a beautiful sunlight, but till then I just want quick and dirty with mac rhino render. Massive good karma to anyone that could step me throught it. Currently I am doing a Directional Light with a little warmth added to the color. But this is the same way I did this 10 years ago when I first started using Rhino. Which leads to the question, any idea when the sun feature will be added?

Thanks,

Carter

Hi,

for 1), you can open up the Material Library, from Render->Materials then move that window over a bit, and drag and drop the material to the layer.

for 2) I’d have to depend on the texture mapping tool.
Applyplanarmapping should do if the surface is planar.
To rotate it, you can open a widget and select the channel which you made a texture OR
right click->object properties there is part for texture mapping and
can rotated by Rotation input, or scale for size.

for 3)… not sure. planar lighting far away do anything similar?