When I open a fresh rhino there are no materials in the material editor, I have to go to the library tab or create a new material or import materials, this is stupid, honestly because the library tab can be used for anything not just materials and why the extra hassles of having to import materials there should be stock materials in the material tab in a fresh file unless it’s a custom template.
When importing materials where are the material libraries located? It would be nice if you guys could hard code a path to find them as an option since windows just goes to your last used directory.
Lastly the material previews in the materials tab are just fancy looking but are pretty much useless. I would rather see a sphere with the material clearly displayed not a rendered shape that tells me nothing about the material at a glance. I can’t see if there is a wood grain a stone tile or what on those previews. Even at large size I can’t really see what these are, they are so shadowed and rendered they don’t really represent the material. Sometimes simplicity is better or at least the option to use spheres.
The propagation of tons of materials and duplicate materials in some files. It’s really looking like a mess in the material tab for some files, I know it’s hard with all the other rendering programs adding their stuff. Also this brings back the old problem of displaying the materials and them rendering within the materials tab.
The material editor shows the materials that are added to the document, hence an empty one on default empty scene. If you do want a set of materials to be there when you first open Rhino you can always make a custom template. Start Rhino, add the materials you most likely are going to use, then save it and when starting a new file from the File > New… menu, select the file you just saved, and check the “Use this file when Rhino starts” check box.
If you right-click on a material you can select Show Preview Pane from the context menu. The preview is resizable to quite big sizes (but that apparently you already found?). From that same context menu you can open the sub-menu Thumbnails, and select the preview object of your choice: Sphere, Cube, Pyramid, Torus and more. Also know that you can rotate the preview scene so you can get a good look at your material from all sides. Right-click drag in the preview thumbnail or preview pane for that.
Previews are rendered with the rendering engine that is the current one. And then it is up to that render engine to do a good conversion for their own shader format. If an engine has custom render content (materials, environments), then it also is up to that engine to ensure a reasonable simulation of that material is available. That said, it will be pretty hard for i.e. advanced Raytraced materials to provide accurate simulations. It does have an XML format of its shaders though, so other engines could write parsers to do a better job at conversions.
Hi Nathan,
I don’t think it’s a good idea to have a materials pane with no standard materials showing when opening a default file but if that’s how McNeel wants to go about it that’s fine too, now that I know that’s what you want. I think there should be a standard glass, metal, plastic and a wood. In fact I can’t think of one program that does this the way you are talking about, there is always an included default material library even in a fresh standard file in the programs I use not an empty pane with only the option to start from scratch.
I know about the right clicking to show the preview as a sphere, sorry I wasn’t clear in my previous post, but I want to do it globally not locally to just to one material. Is there a setting to globally change all material previews to a sphere?
I just want to see larger spheres for all my materials in materials pane instead of the rendered widget thing.
Thanks for your reply.
RM
Hi Andy,
Thanks for asking I would like to see glass, (both raytrace reflective and a non reflective for fast rendering) plastic, procedural wood, a few default materials with colors.
I guess the new way is to not include anything in a new default file? I noticed the old layer order is gone too, personally I always used that old layer order and miss that too as a default but maybe more people complained about not wanting that.
One last small thing, I noticed that from the Library tab I can’t right click and assign a material to all selected objects, like I can in the Materials tab. I can only drag a material onto one object at a time from the Library tab. It would be useful to have the right click menu option to assign a material to all selected objects like the Materials tab has now.
RM
Ah, I didn’t mean to imply that it is supposed to stay like this! Just telling you why it currently is like that. I agree wholeheartedly that we should make all efforts to improve the usability
Right-click on a material thumbnail, open Thumbnails sub-menu, select Properties... You can make preview scene changes there, and then save that as your default.
Thanks for the tip I didn’t know there was yet another sub menu buried there. That works perfect and I see some other useful options there too for previews.
Thanks for your help,
RM
You can probably imagine that your set of defaults will be different to everyone else’s. As Nathan mentioned, you could set up a template - but there is another, possibly better, way.
Unpack the following file - there will be 9 RMTL files in there - the ones you requested. Now open up the Library panel - and if it’s not there already, switch (using the hamburger) to Render Content. You should see a folder called “Default Content”. Drop all 9 of the files into that file (there will already be an environment (RENV) file in there - leave it there).
Brian James was reporting the same problem the other day - I wonder if the reason is because you don’t have the libraries installed (ie - the installer is failing).
Can you open Windows explorer and type this into the address bar:
I’ve just checked in a fix for this - although I’m not able to repeat it here, so it’s a bit speculative. It will be in the next WIP. If it doesn’t work, I’ve also added some extra debugger tools we can use to help figure it out.
Hi Andy,
Yes I imagine my defaults will be different. I’m just used to what was in earlier versions.
Thanks for the library of materials very kind of you to upload them.
RM
