SOLVED: 3do breaking connections

praetus

So, this has happened on three different projects and it is getting very tiring. Everything starts out fine with the project, but if 3DO crashes at any point the textures will fail to load into it. So it looks like the blank gray material. I have tried to force-refresh 3do as well as reload the textures through the re-importer with the hopes it would jolt the previewer by rerendering the project but it didn't reload. If I try to use the 3DO custom loader it will connect the files in 3DO but it will no longer perform the live update.

There is one catch though. If I use the primitives in the previewer it will update just fine. Switch it back to my custom mesh and I get nothing. So somehow it breaks the connections to the custom mesh, and for some of my more complex projects it is incredibly annoying.

Is there something I am missing here? Why does it just quit working with my custom mesh, but it still works with any of the primitives?

Edit: Also, it breaks the connection for my color masks. Now when I press "C" in 3DO to view my color mask the mesh only shows pure black. This happens on both the custom .obj file as well as the primitives. It's broken everywhere.

praetus

Synaesthesia - Yeah that can be annoying as well. As long as the model shares the same UV map I tend to just attach everything together before exporting into dDo for that reason. If you're using different texture maps though it feels like you're out of luck most the time or it is a hassle at least

Jean-Pascal

Sorry to hijack your thread praetus, but I also have the same problem as Synaesthesia.
I combine every part together before exporting in maya, and yet, only one part shows up with the texture in 3do. The other ones remains glossy with no material.

What I don't understand though is that in the demo scene it doesn't have this same issue. Take a look at the orc scene for instance: the different parts aren't welded together (they are simply combined together like I do). And yet, the texture is applied to every parts.

So my guess is that must have something to do with our export settings maybe?

praetus

SOLVED IT!

So, if you make any changes to your original obj export, for the love of god, make sure you keep your object level naming consistent. I made changes toa duplicate object and exported it and apparently that is what broke the connections. I renamed the object to match the original export and when I re-imported it, all my textures updated just fine. The color picker was still broken (showed the object in all black when I pressed "c" in 3do) but I opened the importer and re-rendered the texture and it worked fine.

So yeah, if you update your smoothing groups or anything else, make sure when you export to keep the name the same as it was before.

Eric Ramberg

Hi!

Sorry for being very late on the ball here.. As praetus has discovered you must keep all the naming conventions that you had when you created the project, otherwise DDO doesn´t know which texture goes where!

Let me know if someone still has issues!

LuCh!

What if you don't know what the "original" name was? Is there a way to see what name DDO is using?

I found the name I used in an old file !use good name conventions from the start kids! but if someone runs into this prob in the future (I'm talking about myself here) do answer my question please! xD

Btw, It's fixed so my maps are showing normally, but when I go into edit mask mode the mask won't show up on the model anymore, it's just all black, I can still see it in the Photoshop though so it's not much off a problem but maybe a bug you should look into

Eric Ramberg

Luch! Im sorry to say that I don´t think there is a way..

LuCh!

@ Eric: no worries, now that I know that the name has to stay the same I can keep it in mind so it won't happen again!
Btw, a bit off topic but what version of Photoshop do you recommend to use with DDO? I've used it both with CS6 and CC but on both versions I sometimes get an error that some feature might not be available in my version of PS,
also on my current project the map reimporter isn't working anymore, when I press the button the DDO window just dissapears and reapears again, no import window to be found, any thoughts?
Could it be that I have too many layers?
Maybe I'll try exporting everything and make a new project with it and just add what I still need to do on top, that probably works!

Eric Ramberg

Usually I would say the CC versions have proven more stable, in most cases anyway. Strange with the reimporter though, how many layers do you have in that project?

LuCh!

Atleast I can be assured PS isn't the problem!
It has a lot of layers, 8 different materials with each around 5 smart materials for effects,
It's also 4096x4096 which might have an impact

Eric Ramberg

Should not be a problem with those amounts of materials/layers!
Thanks for reporting this, we will look in to it!

LuCh!

I found out what the problem with the importer was,
I moved the files that I used the first time around, DDO has to be able to read them in again to change them and they have to be in the same location as the first time,
so once you make a DDO project, don't move your source files!

Eric Ramberg

Oh, actually I should have said that but I didn´t think that was the cause, but yes, the files must remain in place once the project is created!

Mad_Llama

So there's no way to actually link renamed object to the project?

Synaesthesia

Hey Mad_Llama!

Please avoid bumping old threads from 2.5 years ago. It's easier to create a new thread with the specifics of the issue you're experiencing so I can look into troubleshooting options for you.

That said, you can't change the name of a mesh group within the Suite and have it function within 3DO. Materials are applied by mesh group name. If the name changes, the viewer does not associate the material with the mesh.