Part colours to suit rendering and design

[daveykbelgium]

We have fairly recently migrated to Wildfire 2, so Wildfire3 is a little way off still, but I’d still like to do some investigating.

Wildfire3 gives us the option to use more sophisticated tools to define part display, i.e. .lwa files inside the Advanced Rendering Extension.

For some years we’ve had a utility that allows us to set all material parameters through a customized mapkey. In Wildfire2, I have been hoping to add colours, textures, bumpmaps etc., but this is WIP.

I still think that this is doable, but someone quite rightly suggested that if you have many parts made of similar looking materials, designers will not be able to so easily differentiate between parts as if they were pink, green, orange etc.

Does anybody have any ideas how you could perhaps switch between a realistic colour and a……let’s say…….”designer colour”?

Thanks in advance

Dave

 

[Guest0527211403]

Dave

If you've defined your colours using specific names for your materials, you could do a swap of your appearance file.

You would need two DMT files, both of which share the same names for each colour, but one is set up specifically for designing(contrasting colours), then when it comes time to render, the other is loaded up in the colour an appearance dialog (File-->Open). The option to override all of the existing colours should be chosen.

It may be a good idea to replace several shades of some colour in your "design" DMT with a single colour in you r render DMT. For example, three parts, all made from the same plastic would appear slightly different while designing, but when you swap the DMT files, they are all replaced by the same colour. You need to decide on that early though, because if you start tweaking the render DMT file properties you need to do the same with ALL like colours!

Good luck!