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Material pick up

Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 10:37 am
by Scottiefeng
Hi Paul,

I really like to use the plugin more as it is quite intuitive.

But quite a few times, I could not pick up the material in viewport.

Any clues?

I was about to finish my first ever octane render in one week's time. Will upload for comments.

Thanks

Re: Material pick up

Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 10:47 am
by face_off
Hi Scottie

From memory, the only situations I can thing of where the material picker does not work is if you have selected an AC Object which is a proxy host - in which case I think you can only material pick materials of the selected proxy, AND if you have NOT selected a proxy host, you cannot pick materials from a proxy.

Does that explain the issues you are having?

Paul

Re: Material pick up

Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2015 1:29 am
by Scottiefeng
face_off wrote:Hi Scottie

From memory, the only situations I can thing of where the material picker does not work is if you have selected an AC Object which is a proxy host - in which case I think you can only material pick materials of the selected proxy, AND if you have NOT selected a proxy host, you cannot pick materials from a proxy.

Does that explain the issues you are having?

Paul

Thanks Paul,

It seems it happens quite and not related to whether I picked up proxy host or not. I have this problem ever since I started using plugin.

Is ther any chance for a 5 mins remote help?

Re: Material pick up

Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2015 2:51 am
by face_off
Is ther any chance for a 5 mins remote help?
Yes - I'm on Skype now - pls me a call when convenient.

Paul

Re: Material pick up

Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2015 11:20 pm
by face_off
Answering here for all to see.....

Scottie - thank you for sending the scene where you could not material pick.

The problem is caused by what appears to be a bug in the ArchiCAD API. It is truncating material names for geometry when the scene is being loaded into Octane. For example, the material "FINISH | PLASTER | INTERNAL (WALLS+CEILINGS)" is truncated to "FINISH | PLASTER | INTERNAL (WA". So it looks like there is a 30 character Surface Name limit internal to some of the ArchiCAD geometry functions.

For for the wall that you could not material pick - shorten the Surface names to 30 characters or less and it will resolve the issue.

I checked with AC18, and it contains the same limitation, however the problem is caught when loading the scene (with a "No Octane material found..." error). I will amend this error to detect if the material name is 30 chars, and if so to suggest shortening the name.

Paul

Re: Material pick up

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2015 3:47 am
by Scottiefeng
Thanks Paul,

I will shorten the name then.