Hi Greg,
(quote of first message added, I'll post this to the dev list)
there wouldn't be a chance to change the handling of alias in
3.5 ?
Like adding 'alias' as a primitive, so rview etc. can display
the
material name as it was before aliasing ?
It means changing stuff at some places, but would help quite a
bit
during material editing or selection.
Greg Ward wrote:
Are you sure this is the behavior most people would want? Personally,
I'd rather know (in rview) what material was actually being used,
rather than the pre-alias name. I typically use aliases to reassign
materials, using something generic like "wall_material" on my surfaces,
then aliasing this to something more descriptive, like "beige870".
Having rview tell me that my wall is made of "wall_material" is not
terribly useful.
Can you explain your problem with the current behavior a little better?
It's as you said, may be a bit more ugly in my case:
Most CAD systems have some internal names for materials, which show up in
the exported geometry files. These names are not necessarily user
definable, or if they are, the user has chosen different names (wall_mat1,
wall_mat2, ....) which will get mapped to the same Radiance material. Both
is true in my case. I would imagine the second could be easily true for
AutoCAD. Other CAD exporters may be even weirder in their choice of
material names.
As you said, material names used in the exported geometry have to be
mapped to descriptive names of Radiance materials, which are typically
stored in some sort of library, and this mapping could be a list of dozen
materials for one scene. Alias definitions glue the two together, with
multiple CAD material names mapped to the same Radiance materials.
Currently, alias defines are lost in frozen octrees. One way to get them
is by adding an "OBJECT oalias;" to the OBJREC structure, which is a waste
of memory and breaks with frozen octrees. Reading the alias file
explicitly doesn't ensure that the alias file and the octree are
congruent, and would work only with rshow.
It'll be useful to have access to both the original name and the aliased
material: The orginal name may be out of reach at that moment, but the
mapping is. To change that I'd need the original name displayed in
rview/rtrace/rshow.
any other experiences and views on this matter much appreciated-
-Peter
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pab-opto, Freiburg, Germany, www.pab-opto.de