Hi,
This is a question about future improved fbx support.
I have noticed that fbx supports export of "materials". I know we do not yet have .fbx for object (just cameras and lights right now). But we may get full fbx sometime soonish (I hope).
My question is what does it mean that we can carry around materials in fbx where TG would be concerned? My understanding is that the materials in an FBX are not baked. SO would full .fbx support mean that we could import materials then? Or are materials still only supported in fbx for the soft they were made in?
OR dose how a material (what software) that a material is made in have nothing to do at all with .fbx, FBX just being a container?
And then, what is it about materials that prevents them from being transmitted from one soft to another without being baked?
So say I have a model where all the details are real geometry. And I color it using materials in mental ray (or whatever). Why can't TG (or other soft) make use of it?
And lastly, if baking is the fix, is it always necessary to bake lights? Or can I just bake it as a texture so that it will light in TG just as a image map would?
I have gotten help here in understanding baking before. And now I do understand it in principal. But Now I need to understand how I can use it in a practical work flow with TG. Since the big plus is that I don't have to do UVs! Although, that means most of the time models must be necessarily high polly... Which I don't mind.
Oh, and its not that I don't want to do procedural textures in TG. But in other soft you can get materials just like you can get TGO for terragen, just drop in and go. So that would be nice to be able to make use of for my TG renders of my objects.
Just asking.
Thanks.
Hi Michael,
FBX supports a bunch of a basic material properties (diffuse, specular etc.) and those would be imported as long as the other software exported them. Well, they would be imported as long as TG was able to support them. Likewise image based textures would be imported. This similar to how OBJ import works now.
You mentioned procedural textures and of course they can't be exported and imported between packages generally speaking. If you are able to bake procedural textures as images then you should be able to use those. If you were baking the textures on models you would bake texture data, and perhaps geometry if it was being generated by a procedural displacement shader. You wouldn't need to bake lighting data as the model would be lit in TG.
Regards,
Jo