Bringing models into a scene with materials

[wardy_mk]

Hello all. Me again. I'm still working on this car showroom. Nearly finished. I'm bringing in cars to fill up the showroom now. I've been given IGES models of the cars which is nice. So, what I intend to do is select all the parts of the car that are sprayed bodywork, then "connect objects and delete" which will give me a single piece which I can colour with the Carpaints from the Chaos Material Library.

This has been working fine BUT because my scene is rather complicated I was working on the cars in a different 'document'. When I copy and paste them into the main scene it seems to lose the colours. They're all coming over plain white and rendering that way too.

1. What can I do to remedy that? Merge the scene? Is there some kind of way to 'reference' the object out of scene? (Like an Xref etc)
2. Is there a more extensive catalogue of car paint colours I can access? I'm still a total beginner and fiddling around with the colours is somewhat time-consuming and producing some strange results!

Thanks in advance folks, you've been awesome the last couple of day! My deadline is today - eek!

[Nejc Kilar]

Howdy!

First thing that came to my mind was maybe when you moved the car + materials to the new scene the texture paths might have been lost. So you might want to check the C4D's Project Asset Inspector for any broken links.

You can also use xRefs, its C4D's native functionality. Just drop an xRef object in your scene and link to the other file. That said, beware, xRefs in C4D can be a bit finicky (read: buggy) at times. I personally do use them but I'm always staying mentally prepared for a small disaster.

As for 2., we offer materials with the Corona Material Library, Chaos Cosmos and then there is also a ton of scanned car paint materials you can access via Chaos Scans (https://www.chaos.com/scans) as well. Scans are already part of your subscription if you're on Premium btw.

[Beanzvision]

Hmm, I tried to recreate this but could not. I textured an IGES model, selected the model+children, copy, new scene, paste. The carpaint from our mat library was also still applied. Perhaps if you plan on opening textured models in other scenes it might be best to save it using the ''Save project with assets'' option and the just open or merge it into a new scene or an existing one.

[wardy_mk]

Hi thanks.
I try not to use XREFs as I've had huge problems with them before. Really odd things happening for seemingly no reason and they only appear in the final render. Very strange. I'll carry on with working on the actual models.

I'll try and 'merge' them or something!

By the way, can you tell me what a 'corona proxy' does?
Thanks

[Beanzvision]

By the way, can you tell me what a 'corona proxy' does?
Thanks

Maybe this will help? https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4528530074001-How-to-use-proxies-C4D

[BigAl3D]

I was trying out the Corona Proxy object to see if it would be useful for me. I have a couple issues with it. First of all, having to go and export as an .cgeo file any object you want to use in another scene as a Proxy would seem to be a big issue for anyone with large libraries of objects.

Second, none of the materials come into the new scene. That article says "To resolve this, simply copy and drag only the material tags onto the proxy object." which sounds simple, but in my test, the .cgeo file I imported did not bring ANY of its materials. I see it says to copy them. Ok, so I opened the other model, selected all objects in that group (middle mouse button), selected all the materials, pasted them into the scene with the proxy. As you can see, the results are slightly off. Good chance I don't understand everything about Proxies, but didn't expect this.

The top image is the Acura in it's own setup scene. Now I have to add that the UVs for this vehicle are a mess, but since I'm not good at UVW mapping, I can get buy with Cubic in most cases.

EDIT:  Looking at my scene again, I thought by dragging the materials from the original onto the Proxy object, Corona would recognize each material and all would be good. Well, let's take the silver car paint. Corona assigned it to slot 8, but I saw that it really should be slot 24. The carpaint is a layered material, which normally wouldn't be on the actual model. The Proxy has all three materials in addition to the layered one. If I delete the extra three, it shifts all the other materials up three slots and it's a big mess.

There has to be a lot that I am missing about this workflow.

[Philw]

My issue with the proxies is that if I remember correctly the object has to be one piece with multiple assigned material tags/selections? Impossible for me to have models combined into one piece of geometry.

Maybe I've misunderstood though?