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Hi,

i portet sucessfuly the Maya SLib Redshift Shaders to softimage. Now i wanna Export a Shaderlibrary with my rendered Shaderballs from the Materialeditor. After importing the Shaderlibrary back into softimage (2013 SP1) the thumbnails are gone. Any Idea ? I also tried to append the SLIB Metals V1 to the Max Shaders Toolbar. Works fine - Thumbnailwise - but the Materials do not get the Name from the Preset they are just named as Material#. I made a new Tab "SLIB RS Metal V1" and use:

<properties id="{3C468833-05D8-4552-AD00-B2115C51753B}" name="Aluminium" display_preset_as_small="False" display_as_text_only="False"></properties>
<item type="scriptbutton" label="Tool" userwidth="120" userheight="130" bitmap="SLib_Aluminium" scriptengine="JScript" tooltip="">
<scripttext><![CDATA[SICreateMaterial("$XSI_USERHOME\\Addons\\Max Shaders\\Data\\DSPresets\\Shaders\\Material\\SLib_Metal_V1\\Aluminium.Preset");]]></scripttext>

Any idea on how to set the MaterialName to the Name of the Preset ?

Does it work for other materials?

If so you could export a sample with just one mat and see the structure of things and how things are linked.

Great initiative though!

I did not found a solution for the missing materiallib thumbnails, instead i created a toolbar with sciptbuttons and the appropriate thumbnails.

Application.SICreateMaterial("$XSI_USERHOME\\Addons\\SLiB Shaders\\Data\\DSPresets\\Shaders\\Material\\SLIB_Metals\\PresetName.Preset", "MaterialName", "", "", "", "")

this way every thumbnail needs to be labeled manualy in photoshop. It's a very repetitive/painful process. Especially porting shaders from Maya to Softimage manualy (Maya UI sucks!).

cgiloom wrote:I did not found a solution for the missing materiallib thumbnails, instead i created a toolbar with sciptbuttons and the appropriate thumbnails.

Application.SICreateMaterial("$XSI_USERHOME\\Addons\\SLiB Shaders\\Data\\DSPresets\\Shaders\\Material\\SLIB_Metals\\PresetName.Preset", "MaterialName", "", "", "", "")

this way every thumbnail needs to be labeled manualy in photoshop. It's a very repetitive/painful process. Especially porting shaders from Maya to Softimage manualy (Maya UI sucks!).

i have been there with this

http://traypen.com/rr/bak/max/max_shade ... review.jpg

share your pain, i gave up because its a stupid process. Too time consuming and also the toolbar gets slow and funky at a times.
The only thing i would try is make an external QT window with shaders but you have to learn how to code and make these connections when you apply the shaders, and i have 0 knowledge of coding, but thats the only idea i can come up with.

Anything inside softimage regarding presets, plain sucks.

You're not suposed to need to use a toolbar, unless you want to visually lay them out in groups with separators and if the script to apply them is not the default one. If things are actual presets, they should be published in the Preset Manager which is inside the Material Manager, but is not technically "The" Material Manager. (you actually don't need .preset files since XSI 2010 to publish presets) You'd use the command-line utility to poke the thumbnail in a .preset file.

The material manager library show the materials that are actually instantiated in the scene, it's not really necessarily the way publish a library of presets, although it could be used that way but it's not elegant. It's more for a series of related game assets, for example. Import/export goes through .xsi which has its limitations, and then the shaderball always re-renderers, it doesn't use a thumbmail file on disk but rather the current parameters of the material in the scene. At this point, I'd trust more a reference .scn file than a mat lib in a .xsi file, just because it's not the native file format.

As the author of the Material Manager, I could probably help you work this out but I'd need a lot of details and files, because I might be confused as to what you're trying to and my memory of the details is fading, plus there is a large degree of ambuiguity with how people call things.