editing materials very very slow

[sboerner]

If the TGO is saved to a different location you may need to relink the textures or move copies of the textures to the same folder.

My offer stands on taking a look at one of the models if you want to send by PM. Or one of your simplified scenes with a placed object. My main workstation is a PC but I still have Terragen installed on my Mac Pro and can check it on both platforms.

[james adamson]

Thanks. I appreciate the offer but I think I may have accidentally solved it. Its weird though, I brought an obj into default scene
spent ages with the slow editing nonsense getting my model to look decent, saved the tgd and moved on to the next one.
I reopened that first scene and all of a sudden editing was performing normally!! So I have imported three objs into default saved it and reopened and that seems to have sorted it out. It makes no sense to me. No files have moved or changed in any way. I have a feeling there is something I am missing and when I look at it tomorrow I will realise I was talking nonsense.
If thats the case and this weird fix was just me tripping out I may well send you what I have.
On the tgo front I made sure all the textures were in the same place when I imported the obj before converting. So the source OBJ
the textures and the exported TGO all live in the same place. Could it be the original mtl file from the OBJ? Alos is there much benefit
converting from OBJ to TGO? 
Cheers.
James.

[sboerner]

Glad it seems to have sorted itself out. Hope it continues to work. Strange though.

Did you get the tgo to work as well? As far as I know tgo's don't reference mtl files, those are for obj files only. When you get errors like missing files when you load a scene you can select Project > Show Project Assets to find out exactly where the problems are. If the files are in the right place then maybe the shader is looking in the wrong place . . . in that case just fix the file paths and re-export the tgo. You can use relative paths, meaning that if the textures are in the same folder you just need the filename and extension. That way they'll always work even if you move the folder.

Saving out object references as tgo's is a good idea and worth the trouble. It eliminates the need for a sidecar file (mtl), and the shading network that you create in Terragen is saved along with the object. Plus it's compressed.

Unfortunately some third-party models can be the source of a lot of problems. Hope you're able to get all 108 of your models fine-tuned and placed successfully in your scene.

FYI in response to a previous question, check out MeshLab, which runs on all platforms. The interface can be a little daunting but it's a great tool for fixing bad meshes. Not sure if it can be used to merge material groups, but it might be worth a look either way.

[james adamson]

Yep. I got the TGO to work thanks for your help. The reason I referred to the mtl is I thought that the TGO would locate the textures from the same location that the mtl pulled them in from. And thanks also for promPting me to go in this direction, I would not have gone there otherwise. Like I said I have a lot of space to fill in my scene so any space saving will help, it has also got me onto editing external materials and shaders in Terragen which is something I have been avoiding.
And yep this process of loading the obj with the slow editing glitch and then saving out as a new scene is repeatable and solves the problem. Very weird but it works so I am not complaining.
Cheers.
James.
I will take a look at meshlab. Not sure if I am up for a daunting interface right now my head hurts!