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If you have
worked with big scenes in XSI, you know how managing materials
can become troublesome. In a scene which requires multiple
objects to share a material, it can be frustrating to
copy/paste the material or save/load it onto the objects every
time you make modifications. Thanks to the grouping feature of
XSI, changes made to a material can be applied and visualized
over a serie of objects in only a few seconds. Here's how you
do it :
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1. |
For this tutorial,
create 6 spheres and scatter them across your scene.
Select one of the spheres then click on Group.
This creates a group containing the sphere with no
properties assigned to it. Give the group a name if you
wish, then close the panel. |
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2. |
Let's
assign the group a basic material by first pressing
3 to go into Render mode, selecting the group in
an Explorer view (8 on the keyboard), and
clicking Material > Phong. Move the
Color slider to a nice red.
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3. |
In a shaded
view, you can notice that the sphere you selected
earlier adopted the material that you assigned to the
group. Since the sphere is under its influence, any
changes made to the material will automatically affect
the sphere.
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4. |
Now all you
have to do is drag and drop the other spheres onto the
group in the Explorer. Try expanding the group's node by
clicking the + next to it and double-clicking on
the material. Modify it and you will see the spheres
change colors immediately.
Note that
when you select the group, the objects that are affected
are highlighted in a light gray so you can clearly see
their affiliation. In the case below, sphere1, 2, 3 and
5 are in group Red_Material_Group.
I hope this short
tutorial helped you understand how grouping works. If
you have any questions, contact
me!
-GIRAFFE |
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