Imported obj colors not showing

[treddie]

Howdie.
I was troubleshooting why the surface colors that import with an .obj file, weren't rendering; everything was coming out grey.  I did something to get it to work, but could not duplicate what I did later.  The correct colors show up in the multishader that gets created when I import the .obj file...they just won't render.  Any clues?
Thanks for the help,
treddie

[treddie]

...Forgot to mention that it only happens when trying to build a population.
treddie

[Harvey Birdman]

Hey, guy -

Seeing as no-one else has responded, if you can post the .obj and your .tgd somehow I'll take a look at it, if you like.

[peejay]

hey Treddie

sometimes TG2's path handling isn't what it should be. I've had it 'lose' textures before now, even when they show up in the multishader. Sometimes you can fix it by going into the multi-shader and re-assigning the textures to exactly what they say they already are, and this kind of kick starts TG2 to remember it's supposed to be using them. Doesn't always work, but it's worth a try

[rcallicotte]

I've never lost a texture if it was mapped in the Multishader.  Is this what you're talking about, peejay?

[treddie]

Solved it.
Apparantly the textures got corrupted like you said, peejay.  I simply re-imported the object last night and everything worked.  I also played with the color sliders last night as well, like you did, and that was what originally fixed the problem, but I couldn't duplicate the result later on the "real" file, so that's why I was confused if that was what I actually did to solve the issue, originally.  One possibility for the corruption was that I was not yet really familiar with all of the controls for object positioning/scaling etc., so in the process of feeling out how the controls responded to different inputs, I may have stumbled onto a bug as I was doing things in a haphazard, not very "pipeline" efficient way.  Unfortunately, I can't duplicate what I did to nail down the bug.

Thanks for the responses, all.
treddie

[rcallicotte]

It might help Planetside (and all of us) if you actually found a bug and it wasn't something tied to your processes.  As I said above, I've never had a path in the Multishader just disappear.  On the other hand, I have seen MTL files get jacked up or not be correctly inserted into TG2 or be misaligned due to work outside of TG2. 

Anyway, it would help us all, if you could be less nebulous about the error in TG2 while claiming there is one. 

[peejay]

calico

what's happened to me is that the textures appear with the correct path in the multishader, but just don't render. I put this down to them being in different places. Sometimes I'm too lazy to import and re-assign all the textures to the same directory, and this incarnation of TG2 doesn't seem to like being asked to look in more than one place at a time for it's imports, so re-assigning (to where they already are) in the multishader seems to remind it.
I understand what Treddie is saying, Sometimes these glitches repeat, sometimes they don't. I 'think' it has to do with the memory usage. You tend to get less glitches early on in a piece of work, or when you've just saved a file, than when you've been working on it a while - and if that's true, I'm not even sure you can point the finger at TG2, I'm running Windows XP, and that does so much stuff behind the scenes that we never asked it to do, don't really want it to do, and (speaking personally) can't seem to stop it doing, that it seems to screw up 'simple' programs, let alone the really memory intensive ones.

[rcallicotte]

calico

what's happened to me is that the textures appear with the correct path in the multishader, but just don't render. I put this down to them being in different places. Sometimes I'm too lazy to import and re-assign all the textures to the same directory, and this incarnation of TG2 doesn't seem to like being asked to look in more than one place at a time for it's imports, so re-assigning (to where they already are) in the multishader seems to remind it.

@peejay - This has to do with your MTL that isn't set correctly.  I've seen the same thing.  But, when you run your file through a program like PoseRay, it makes sure everything is where it says it is.  Poser, for example, doesn't always do this correctly.  I've never had this incident happen, after using PoseRay (under the 16 texture limit, of course).  The MTL and TG2 then work together.

Object woes will hopefully be addressed, after the program goes Gold, for which I can barely contain myself.  But, I am.   

[peejay]

sorry calico - it isn't

I've had TG2 'lose' the textures for the xfog birch tgo, right after having just rendered them

like you said, heres hoping all these annoyances will be fixed in the final release

[Mr_Lamppost]

I can second what peejay is saying.  I have had this lost texture problem as well.  It is not consistent and not guaranteed repeatable.  I usually encounter it like this:

I build a scene containing several objects and populations, adding them one at a time and making test renders as I go.  If I then decide to stop working on the scene and save my work usually under a new file name but not always.   

The next day I decide to resume working on my scene so open TG and load my file; most of the time no problem but sometimes one of the objects will generate a whole string of not able to load file errors. 

Ways to fix it:

Quit and restart TG, reload the same file, sometimes works.

Open the object's internal network and reassign all the offending textures to the same files that they are already assigned to.

This is the curious one: Add another object or population.  When Tg loads the new object it also re-loads the other objects in the scene.  So far this has worked every time.

I am also running Windows XP; I would not in the slightest be surprised if this is a  Windows problem.

[treddie]

I also may not have explained myself clearly.  I meant to say IF there is a bug.  I was stating that it was a little bit blurry as to what was actually happening.  In my particular case, I hadn't applied any bitmaps yet, so there was no way to "lose" that info from the multishader.  I was simply having an issue where the COLOR was not rendering that was indicated in the "Diffuse Color" slot.  Going back and re-importing my .obj files and dialing in the parameters fixed it.

As an update, I applied leaf bitmaps/w alpha today to the leaves and everything came out great.

IT"S ALLLLIIIIIVVVVVEEEEEEEEE!

treddie