Hi all
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for early users when using Brazil is coming to grips with the way materials work. Having a useful set of preset materials to work from - and to check out how they work - is a great help in the early stages of the learning curve. We've started a material gallery at the brazil.mcneel.com website, but we'd be delighted if users would contribute.
Here's how to submit materials to the material gallery. It looks complicated and the instructions are a bit long, but it's easy once you get used it it - and they're only long because (hopefully) I've detailed every step as much as possible.
A) Uploading the material file to McNeel.
1) Create your material in the material editor.
2) Give it a useful name
3) Right click the thumbnail and choose "Save to file..." Save the RMTL file onto the desktop - you will use this file for the preview.
4) Right click the thumbail again and choose "Upload". The upload process will take a minute or so.
5) Copy the resulting URL to the clipboard and keep it somewhere safe. This is the "Upload URL".
B) Creating the preview image
1) Download this file:
2) Unpack the zip file and open the 3dm file in Rhino.
3) Switch the perspective view to "Rendered View"
4) Press the "Restore down" button on the Rhino window to show both the desktop and Rhino making sure that you can see the RMTL file you saved in step A3 at the same time as the perspective window.
5) Drag the RMTL file from the desktop onto the beige surface of the object. This will load the material into the model and apply it to the surface.
6) Press the blue Render button. Depending on the speed of your computer, this may take a few minutes or so.
7) Press the "Save" button on the render window and save the file as a JPG to your desktop. This is the preview image.
C) Creating the gallery post
1) Open this page in your web browser:
2) In the field "Image to Upload", pick the preview image (step B7) from your desktop.
3) In the field "Subject", choose a name for your material (perhaps the same name as in step A2)
4) In the field "Tags", add some words which might be used to describe your material (glass, transparent, blue, shiny - etc)
5) In the field "Description", add a short description of your material - and make sure to include the Upload URL to the file (step A5). This is a crucial step because this is the only way users will know how to download your material.
6) Press the "Save" button at the bottom of the page to finish the process.
7) You can now safely remove the
That's it! The material should show up in the gallery immediately after submitting it.
Thanks!