Pretty Poly Editor Documentation

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I. PPE Manual - 2. Using the Material Editor (MAD)..

A Material is something which can be layed on top of any surface in the PrettyPoly editor. It was decided early on that an editor for Materials was required, and would be of use as a stand alone program, as well as integrated into the model editor itself. Thus MAD, or the MAterial eDitor was born, functioning in both a stand alone version, "madTest", or as an integrated editor.

Starting MAD from the command line

MAD can be started like PrettyPoly by typing "examples/madTest" at the command line from the main PPE directory. This brings up the material editor GUI, allowing you to edit materials from outside PrettyPoly.

Starting MAD from inside PrettyPoly

There are several ways to do this ;

Getting down to business : Quick start

Alright, to start creating materials what you do is click the "sphere" icon to the far right of the main window, above the state list. This creates a new state for you to work with - a "state :" will appear on the list. Click on that to highlight it. Now to set the name of the state, click on the text input bar above the list, type the name, and press enter. The name should appear after the "state : " text.

Next click on the red sphere with the wrench through it, which is next to the icon you clicked before. The material editing window should pop-up. This shows all the properties of the material which you can change and some previews of the last few materials you have clicked on (or copies of the basic, empty material).

First click on the "Basic Parameters" tab. Now you can change the colours of the ambient, diffuse, specular, and emission values for the material. You can also change the materials shininess.

Click on the "Maps" tab next. From here you can assign a texture map to the material. Click on the texture button, and a directory listing will pop-up. Choose the texture file to use, and it will appear on the material. It's important to note that only a few image file formats are supported by Pretty Poly, and even less by its supporting library, Plib. What this means is that reloading models will only reload textures if the textures are in "*.rgb", "*.rgba", or "*.bmp" file formats, even though the material editor will also allow you to load "*.png" and "*.jpg" files.

Go back to the main window, which should show the material as it stands, in the top left hand corner thumbnail. Click on "apply" to set this material in the main GUI window to allow you to add it to any surface of a model.

To add to a model, select the vertices you want to texture, Then click the "Selection" menu then "Toolbox->selection". Now any changes you make in the material editor will be immediately reflected by the material on the model.

Selecting States from the list

Right click with the mouse selects a state, and holding down ctrl whilst right clicking allows you to select multiple states. The only use for this now is with the save all option, which will save the multiple selection, instead of the whole list.
 

The main MAD window

The main MAD consists of a preview of the current material in the top left corner, some options for display beneath it, and a toggle list of the current available materials to the right. Left clicking previews the material in the top left corner view. If you have loaded a model, all the materials from the model will be present in this list. Clicking on The sphere icon will create a new material, or state, for you to edit.

Just above the toggle list to the far right there are some icon buttons. The first button, a sphere with an wrench through it, pops-up the material editing window.

There are two modes the editor can be in - Internal and Auto-update. Internal mode means no changes are made to the actual material until the "Apply" button is pushed. This means you can edit, until you are happy with your changes, or revert to the original material if needed, then commit them to see their effect on the model. Auto-update means all changes are automatically reflected throughout PrettyPoly ; in all models which have that state in them. To toggle Auto-update or internal mode, click on the Auto-update check box.

There are two different tree views available in PrettyPoly - the scene view and the library view. You can change these by clicking the appropriate box. The scene view shows all the Materials currently loaded in PrettyPoly ; that is, all the materials from any models and the ones loaded by Mad itself. The library view shows all materials in the standard material directory set by Mad. PrettyPoly comes with several built in materials for your use, which are shown by this view.  You can also set this directory to your own library of materials, which perhaps you are using in your project.

The thumbnail shows the preview of the current material. It has several preview modes ; sphere, cylinder, cube and flat, which all show the material wrapped around that object. Press the button next to the thumbnail to change the preview mode. Also if the checker button is pressed checkers will be drawn behind the thumbnail, instead of a flat colour background.

The file system view can also be setup to show either or both of texture maps and materials, by clicking the appropriate check boxes.

The MAD editing window

If you choose to edit the material, the editing window pops-up, which consists of a series of preview boxes for materials, Some icons to control previewing, and load/save, a name input box, and a tab box with a series of property controls.

The preview thumbnails at the top show the last five Materials clicked on in the editing views. Clicking on any of these changes the current material to the one clicked on, so you can edit it.

The "Basic Parameters" tab allows you to alter all the values for colours the material may present, plus some other basic features, like shininess.

The "Maps" tab allows you to specify texture maps to use for the material.

The "User" tab will be used for and user specific data. 

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