I've updated my Material Tool with some useful features. I've made a video to try to show them. The quality isn't good, at least the texts should help to understand.
It's a little long, so if you want to watch it, do it with time.
Picture:
Here's the vault entry:
http://forums.kc-mm.com/Gallery/BrawlView.php?Number=23278History:
Material Tool was born shortly before the first dae imports were possible. The first minimalistic version had the ability to modify a few values in the materials just like in the old Brawlbox, only that it was possible to make the same edit to every material at the same time. It also was capable to make obj-imports to be affected by lighting, cause they were flat colored and there as no possibility to vertex color.
Time after that, I improved the program, made it capable of editing one more value that I related to the type of material at that time, and made an option to convert the first shader in the model between a stage shader or a character shader. The said value changed from 1 to 3 consequently for the materials, without knowing that it really was the number of stages used in the shader. Didn't know that part, but it certainly worked. I also made it show the current material name and index.
The last update gave the tool the capability to change the value for all the color nodes. At that time some imports came too bright due to having white instead of grey in the colors, and I found this useful. I also made the hidden menu, which allowed me to switch between the different modes of lighting in an easy way. It also allowed me to control the transparency modes and the multiplier value in each shader separately. As it was hidden, I didn't make it user-friendly, cause I did know how to use it, and the few people that knew about the menu were told how it worked by me.
Newer versions of Brawlbox came, and the color option in the tool was obsolete. But the changes possible in the hidden menu were still time-saving, as well as everything that had to be made to all the materials. But I needed something capable of editing a selection of materials, not just all of them. So I started editing the tool I had not touched since then, and made it capable to select in a list what to edit. I updated the names of the editable values according to Brawlbox 0.67b, and included all the values I use to edit when making stages or characters, including the ones that are for each texture. After all this was done, I thought of the possibility of importing a material and apply it to all the selected ones, and did so. And after that, I worked on the idea of importing all the materials found in another model, one after another, into the selected ones. This way, if the source model was an old version of the same model, this means having the same number of materials and in the same position, I could make changes in max more easily. If I import some model, I give it all the material properties one by one, including the texture renaming and stuff, and then I see that I've forgot some edit in 3DSMax, I have to re-import and re-work all the textures one by one. With the new feature in Material Tool, I can forget about that, cause I only need the materials to have the proper number of textures each, and the model to have the proper shaders in it. The program even detects which shader are using the materials in the source model, and if there are enough, the current materials change automatically the used shader to fit the original configuration. And that's what I show in the video.
In the video, I get one of my stages, and simulate a change in max by just exporting it as .dae. In the example, the models only have a few materials, and would not take much to do manually. But there are other models that sure have more materials, and the tool would save time on those. After giving the re-imported models the needed shaders and texture nodes, I just use Material Tool to import the materials from the original model. After doing so, the stage works just like before, only that I've not manually edited or imported any of the materials, but made the program to do it automatically for me.
The hex string in the extra menu are nearly the same as before, that will probably be the part people won't know how to use. The first 2 of them are just the area in Brawlbox with the name 'LightingChannel'. The 'next' button makes the program to load a default value for all that area, loading up to 3. To apply the change, the enter key has to be used in the editable box itself. The values can be manually edited, but you have to know what you're doing. The box in grey shows the current value in the material.
The other 2 show some area including values related to transparency and other stuff. The next button switches between 3 sets again, one of them for no transparency, the next of them for normal transparency, and the last of them for blended transparency.
For the small text box with the C0X8 value, only the 3rd number is important. It changes the ColorScale value in the first stage of the current shader. Not really meant to be used, but it was there in the last version and I left it there.
So this is it, if you use the tool and find it useful, it will be allright. If nobody besides me uses it, it will be fine too, cause I'm going to use it myself and that's already something.
