In the tab called Edit Geometry, browse for and select your mesh file. If you require more than one mesh file in your Accessory product, hit the Add New Mesh button. When you are done adding mesh files, hit Apply Changes to see the effect of your changes or move on. Whenever you hit the Add Mesh button, a new material slot is added in the Edit Textures tab at the bottom of the stack. Remember to give your new mesh a number in the Mesh ID box.
Edit Geometry Panel
NOTE: It is wise to Save or SaveAs as often as possible.
4.g Change the Material files
In the tab called Edit textures, you will notice a material window named Material0. This contains a slot for material/.xrf files, actual texture files, texture file name, material ID, a delete button, a New Material button and a whole lot of check boxes.
Edit Textures Panel
4.g.1 Material Properties
Each Material panel contains a series of check boxes that affect how the texture is seen in IMVU. The first of these, Use Blending, tells the material that the opacity map supplied (if you supply an alpha map) should use full opacity as opposed to rough cutout. Full opacity means that all 255 levels of gray are factored into creating the final alpha image. Cutout means that only black and white are taken into consideration – with all of the grays being turned into either white or black.
Directly to the right of this check box is the Mode drop down menu. If you checked the Use Blending checkbox, the Mode drop down tells the full opacity map whether it can be an Additive blend or just stay a composite blend. Additive blending literally takes the texture and “adds” light values to it based on values in your opacity map. The more additive textures you have in front of one another, the brighter and brighter they get. COOL! This is handy for things like shafts of light.
The second check box, Two Sided, tells the material to render no matter what side of a polygon you are looking at. Handy for draping hair and the like.
The third checkbox, Self Illuminated, makes the material unaffected by the Scene’s lighting. This is handy for things like fire or anything that you want to stay bright.
The fourth checkbox, Fog Override, makes the material unaffected by fog. This is VERY handy for sky textures.
The fifth checkbox is Vertex Colors. If you have exported a mesh that contains vertex colors, you can view them on a per-material basis by checking this box in each material.
4.g.2 Browse for new textures
In the material window named P0M0, browse for the Material/.xrf file that corresponds to the first material in your MAX file. This Material/.xrf file would contain the sub-material with the [0] in its name. Next, delete the texture names underneath the texture images. This wipes the texture slate clean and allows your pending texture change to take effect. Next, click on the actual picture of the texture and browse for your new texture. Make sure the Material ID is set to 0 (zero) and hit apply changes. The most noticeable change in the previewer should be that an icon of your texture has replaced the original texture.
4.g.3 Adding Materials
As you add new meshes and materials to those meshes, the name of the material panel will procedurally change from Material0 to Material1, Material2 and so on.
4.g.4 Texture Animation
Texture animation rox. Within every material’s panel, there lives a Texture Animation Parameters panel. The boxes in this panel allow you to make a texture move – neat! The first thing you need to do to access this functionality is turn ON texture animation.
Currently, IMVU supports two types of texture animation, Scrolling and Cycling. These are accessed in the Mode dropdown. Scrolling allows you to slide the texture across the surface of a mesh in a direction and speed of your choosing. Cycling allows you to sample frames within a given texture. An example of Scrolling can be found on the water in the Cast Away Raft room (product651). An example of Cycling can be found on the fire in the Romantic Log Cabin room (product608).
Cell width and Cell height are used for Cycling animations. The number here is in pixels and tells the animator what size you want your animation cell size to be. For example, if I had a texture that was 128x64 and I happened to have four separate frames drawn across it from left to right, my Cell width would be (128/4=) 32 and my Cell height would be 64.
Offset X and Y allow you to offset where your first frame of a Cycling animation begins. This is very handy if you have one large texture that contains several Cycling animations on it. Set your X and Y to 0, 0 to use the full texture, or different values to use a subset of the texture. The cell rectangle does not have to divide the dimensions of the texture evenly, and it doesn't have to have the same proportions as the texture.
Start Cell is used for Cycling animations and tells the animator which frame to start on. This is handy for things like flickering candles where you may want to use the same texture on a bunch of candles but don’t want them to animate the exact same way (meaning looking EXACTLY the same in IMVU). With this feature, you could use the same texture on multiple candles but have them all appear different in IMVU. Of course, you COULD just make new textures per each flickering candle but that would needlessly increase the file size of your product.
Direction X and Y are used for Scrolling animations. These deltas specify the amount (direction and speed) to scroll, positive numbers going down and right. The delta is in Fixels (fractional pixels)
# of Cells (I know, it says 0 of cells – we’re working on it) allows you to define how many Cells the animator should include in a given animation. By calling setting Offset X/Y or Start Cell, and then setting the number of cells with this function, you can use a single texture sheet for multiple sets of cells.
Frames per Cell allows you to slow down the animation. You can specify that it takes
multiples of 1/30 sec to advance a frame of animation.
4.g.5 Material files with Alpha
There is an issue with loading a Material file that contains an alpha channel into a slot that does not already contain it. Basically, it pretty much breaks your product. However, there is a workaround. Once you have loaded a Material file that has Alpha into a non-alpha Material slot, the product looks for an alpha material but can't find one. Plus, because the original Material file did not contain an Alpha map, you don't have the option to browse for the Alpha map. So, SAVE the product. After you save, you will notice that all of the material icons have disappeared. Don't worry – now that there are no textures in those texture slots, you are now able to browse for your alpha channel. Do so, hit Apply Changes and all should come back looking healthy.
4.g.6 Add or Delete
Some CFL files have a different amount of Material slots than your Accessory. Thus, we have supplied you with Add and Delete buttons. Clicking the add button adds a new material to the bottom of the list. While clicking the delete button deletes the Material that contains the button you are pressing. As you add or delete materials, please make sure that the Material/.xrf file you are using contains a sub-material whose name matches the Material ID number in the window.
If the CFL file you started with contains more materials than you need, it is wise to delete them. Otherwise, the size of your CFL file will be unnecessarily large. There are two steps to deleting those extra files: delete the material reference in the Edit Textures tab and deleting the actual files from the CFL tab.
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