Re: Retaining Labels & Textures When Swapping Materials

[DMerz III]

I can get this to work for one piece of geometry at a time. I'm wondering if there's a way to "retain textures" to a whole group of parts, even though they have different textures.

Imagine the following scenario:

I have a device with numerous types of materials all in one group in my scene tree. I want to make a shadow pass by changing all the materials in the scene to diffuse>white. But we want to keep the bump texture on everything because we want that to be retained in the shadow pass.

Currently I have to go through each part and change to white diffuse because if I drag and drop a saved Diffuse>White while holding ALT, it will wipe the bump from everything, probably because it's a group and isn't yet 'smart' enough to determine to 'retain multiple bump maps at once'.

If anyone has some insights on this, that'd be great. It's not a huge priority for us, but it would save some time in our workflow and we're always looking for that. Perhaps I should post this idea in the "wants" section 

[richardfunnell]

Hey David,

I split this into a new topic, but I may have a workaround for you.
Select your whole model, and change the material type for the whole model to diffuse. Then drag over a white color (not material) to your root model level. You can then disable any color textures, change your background color (and turn down GI, ray bounces, etc), to get your shadow pass. Does this help speed it up?

Images attached

[DMerz III]

Ah, Richard! You've done it again, I think this will work.

Thank you!

Also, thank you for introducing the idea of shadow passes to us in the first place.

[richardfunnell]

Awesome, glad this helps! Looking forward to seeing you in a few days at RenderWorld!