Material Mystery

    Hi All,


    I'm having an odd issue with some materials when importing a character model from DAZ studio as an OBJ.

    I've re-pathed all the texture maps and everything looks as it should in a rendered Rhino 6 viewport. But once I go into Enscape, some materials seem to go black or are not receiving lighting.

    It doesn't seem to make a difference if the materials are left as custom or converted to Enscape Materials.

    It's happened with both models I've tried with this workflow: DAZ Studio export out to OBJ import into Rhino 6.

    Texture maps are .jpg files

    From the looks of the Enscape result, I'm guessing there is something happening with the metallic setting or self illumination, I don't know - I've messed with these settings also, but they don't seem to so anything.

    Any Material/Shader experts out there?

    This could be a material issue, but it could also be caused by inverted normals. The only way to know for sure would be to look at the original .obj

    Hi Pieter,


    Thanks for the reply. I did check the normals on the mesh in Rhino and all looked fine. I'll go back and open the OBJ in Max and see if I can find anything there.

    Also, if the normals were reversed, wouldn't that show up in the rendered viewport?


    I'm going to try another experiment where I assign other basic materials to the model to see what happens.

    I'm also wondering if it could have something to do with the UV mapping.

    Inverted normals aren't always a problem with rendering. For example when I prepare assets in Blender it still renders fine (for the most part) with inverted normals, but in Enscape this will cause bigger issues.


    It could be a mapping thing, but I would expect that to also be an issue on the Rhino side, unless the mapping is somehow failing to be exported properly to Enscape.

    Update:

    With thanks to Pieter for his help.


    I was able to find all the correct combinations of normal directions and export settings from Max and bring the model in through the custom asset creator.

    In the end I was able to get the hula pose to ride with the FBX instead of the model reverting to a simple 'A' pose by, I think, including the animation settings at export from Max.


    I think it also helped to convert enscape materials and check the double-sided option in the Asset creator.


    Consider this mystery solved.