Using the Material Manager
Many objects are setup to have more than one map for any given channel (color, bump, etc.).
The most common example is a humanoid character where one map is used for the head and another
for the body. Often the UV mapping for such an object is such that the UV mapping for the head
overlays the UV map for the body. In this case, if you attempt to assign the same map to both the head
and the body, problems will occur while painting (paint on the body will appear on the head as well).
With all of that being said (and you probably knew it already), we need to be able to
assign maps to each material in the object. This is where the Material Manager
comes in. In this tutorial, we will create several maps and assign them to different
materials of an object.
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Intermediate Tutorials
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Step 1. Click on the Maps Tab, then from the Maps menu, click on
Create New Map, then click on OK.
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Step 2. In the Maps window, click on the newly created map to select it,
then right click (CTRL-click with one button mouse on the Mac) and choose
Change Default Color. Select the color Red from the color chooser.
Then right click again and choose Clear Map.
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Step 3. Now, let's rename the map. Right click on it again and then choose
Rename. Call it RedColorMap and then click OK.
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Step 4. Repeat the procedure creating green and blue maps as well. The only
reason why we are making the maps red, green and blue at this time is so
they will be clearly visible on the model when we apply them to different
materials.
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Step 5. Now that we have a few maps to play with, let's assign them to different
materials. Click on the Manager tab, click on the + sign next to
Materials to expand the tree branch. Click on the triangle next to the
material Skin (which in this case is the skin material on the head only).
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Step 6. A window will then pop up with the properties of the material Skin.
Click on the map box next for the Color channel and select RedColorMap.
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Step 7. An alternative way to assign a map to a channel is to simply drag and drop it
from the Map Manager. Let's do that for the material SkinBody. Close the
material window for Skin and then open the window for SkinBody. Click
on the Maps tab and then drag and drop the blue map onto the map box for the color channel.
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Step 8. Repeat either steps 6 or 7 to assign the green map to the Eyes material and then observe the
results in the viewport. We have new have three different maps assigned to the object (four actually, since
in this case, there was already a map assigned to all materials and it's still assigned to the ones we didn't edit).
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Step 9. Now, let us emphasize the fact that even though we have three different maps assigned
to the same object, can paint across the material boundaries as easily as we could if it were all
a single map. Apply a paint stroke (in this case, we chose a brush texture from the library as well)
across the three separate maps. Looking closely at a material boundary we see how smoothly
the paint goes from one map to the other.
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