Max 2008: Vertex colors, copy and paste?

Ryno

Does anybody know of a way to copy and paste vertex colors to a new Vertex Paint Modifier?

I've got some models that have been vertex painted, but were collapsed down to Editable Poly. Now I'd like to add additional radiosity information, but by cooking out the radiosity information, all original vertex coloration is overwritten. What I'd like to do is to recover the hand-painted vertex coloring that has already been done but collapsed, and to paste that into a new Vertex Paint Modifier, where it can be blended (overlay, whatever) with the radiosity Vertex-Paint pass.

The data for the vertices must be cached somewhere. I find it odd that there's no copy-paste functionality for vert colors. I mean for UVs, even if you collapse down you can add another Unwrap and still copy/paste data. But recovering vertex color data for use in a new Vert Paint modifier, or to be moved to the vertex Illumination channel doesn't seem to be available.

Also, once collapsed you can no longer use blur, adjust color (levels), and all of those other nifty tools. This just sucks.

Has anyone dealt with this issue, and/or am I missing something fairly obvious?

Rob Galanakis

Assign a new Vertex Paint modifier, and select "Condense to Single Layer" on the bottom, and you will again have control over the vert colors.

romi

hmm, another thought is using tools menu -> Channel Info tool. here you'll see all channels comprising your object. so you can easily select the VC (vert color) channel and copy it to the vert illumination channel. hope that helps.

cheers,
Rom
snowblindstudios.com

Ryno

Excellent guys, thanks for the help. It didn't occur to me that I could still Condense to a Single Layer after collapsing and adding a new Vert Paint. (It kind of appears to be a single layer at that point, but it's obviously caching data in the background.)

The channel info dialog is a good tip as well.

Appreciate the tips, guys.