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Help with smart materials


Grimm
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I have started to get back into doing 3D after being just too busy. :)  It seems to me that every time I try to dig in and learn how to do smart materials I hit brick wall after brick wall.  I'm missing the basic logic in how they work.  

My latest attempt was to make a porcelain material for some victorian style electrical insulators.  I wanted to start with a white glossy layer first for a foundation.   I added another layer to add on top of that a layer of rust blemishes.  I wanted to control these blemishes with a condition and used one of the noise images for it.  I left the condition type to always because I wanted an even random distribution for it.  

This appears to not to work, at least not as I would expect it.  I tried to plug the same texture in the first layer and inverted it thinking that this might modulate both layers so they would share the same space.  This also didn't work.  I have looked at several tutorials but non of them talk about how do you control how the different layer mix.  Any tutorials out there that go into this?  Thanks :D 

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The smart material layer stack works from the bottom up, you have it inverted with the blemish layer on the bottom. 

You can move layers up and down in the layer stack, shown in the picture. The drop down arrow appears when you hover over the layer name box area.

Also you can save your smart material as an extension, upload it here for others to looks at to help you.  
File menu--- Create extension 

David.

Smart.jpg

Edited by digman
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Heh, thanks David, that is probably been my issue all along.  It's very counter intuitive though, I assumed that any new layers would automatically be on top of the old layers.  Not having buttons to move the layers is also very unintuitive.  When smart materials first appeared there was no way to move the layers, so I have been waiting for that to happen. :(  Thanks again.

Jason

Edited by Grimm
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Thanks again for your help David! :D I was able to get a pretty good porcelain material now that I understand what is going on.  One of the things that confused me was that when you first open up a new smart material you get a first layer.  Then if you add another layer (on the Linux version at least) the new layer will pop in under the first one.  This is very confusing when it (I think) should open above the first layer.  Any new layers after the second will pop in above like normal.  Does anyone else see this too?  If it can be confirmed, I will post a Mantis bug.  The second image is my reference image.

Jason

sm-test3.png

0AAF.jpg

Edited by Grimm
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2 hours ago, Grimm said:

I put in a mantis issue on the layer problem as it's still a problem in 4.7.24:

http://3dcoat.com/mantis/view.php?id=2273

Yes, maybe a Linux issue. Windows version 2.7.26, the layers are creating in order. The first layer on the bottom and the next layer added on top.

Smart_M.JPG

Edited by digman
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