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Missing materials

Missing materials

Postby Gtox » 09 Feb 2015, 09:10

Certain models appear with a pink and white chequerboard pattern. When you click on the material editor, a warning box appears ("material file is not existing in resources" etc). Sometimes the problem goes away seemingly by itself (when I first created a road, it had this issue. I closed down Skyline and opened it again and it was resolved). With other models (the stock ninja) the problem hasn't gone away (although there is a material file in the ninja folder). With the dragon model, there is no material file, just textures. Is there a way to fix this issue?
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Re: Missing materials

Postby SolarPortal » 09 Feb 2015, 10:37

This sometimes happens when adding resources into skyline while running, and using the asset manager to load them.
It ends up skyline needing restarted for some weird reason. We have noted this before.

There is also an error that can occur where nothing seems to load correctly. Simply regenerate resources from the AssetManager > Main Menu > Resources > Recrease Main Resource list. Reboot skyline, and things should resume again :)

Hope this helps :D

If not, perhaps a video showing the error. This will help in locating the problem. thanks :)
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Re: Missing materials

Postby Gtox » 09 Feb 2015, 11:22

Here's a video of what happens.
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Re: Missing materials

Postby Gtox » 09 Feb 2015, 11:41

If I drag the nskingr.jpg texture directly onto the ninja mesh, the texture appears on the model, however the material editor still won't open. For what it's worth, I'm not particularly interested in the ninja, I'm just using it as an example. Many of the stock meshes have this issue.
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Re: Missing materials

Postby SolarPortal » 09 Feb 2015, 12:10

oh, they shouldn't have that issue, we certainly won't have released with them broken lol :P

Q> Did you try recreating the resources? This normally fixes these sorts of errors.
Q> Where was skyline installed to on your harddrive? (folder path, harddrive letter etc...)

All User Q> Does anyone else have this problem? If they do, then we are going to have to look into this quite deeply.

I will do my best to help you solve this problem. :)
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Re: Missing materials

Postby Gtox » 09 Feb 2015, 12:13

I did recreate the resources. Skyline is installed to the default location (c:\Aurasoft\SkylineSDK etc). If affects many, but not all of the stock meshes. I did have one or two problems with my own meshes, but restarting Skyline fixed the issues.
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Re: Missing materials

Postby SolarPortal » 09 Feb 2015, 12:25

ahh, i see the problem now. :)
Looking at the material file. We created the material from the texture, so the material has the name "nskingr".
In the video, the submaterial is named as "Examples/Ninja". Which doesn't exist in the library because of bad naming lol.
For this character to work, you would have to drag the "nskingr" material onto the mesh.

We made a preset of the character with the correct material applied and stored it in:
"Asset Library/Presets/Characters".

When skyline cannot find the material which is defined in the .mesh file, it will throw a material error to let you know the material is missing. There are ways of editing the mesh files to reference the new material names, but it is an advanced feature.
I think this ninja problem is solved.

As for your meshes having problems, but after a reload of skyline they work. This is due to the resources not existing at that moment. This is a known bug and has bugged( drum sound: ba dum chhiii :P) us for quite some time.

Hope this info clears a few things up. :)
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Re: Missing materials

Postby Gtox » 09 Feb 2015, 13:04

Yup, dragging the material onto the mesh works. Well done :)
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Re: Missing materials

Postby Gtox » 09 Feb 2015, 13:29

Correction - it sort of works, blast! Most the time the material you expect to be associated with mesh doesn't work, while a completely random one does work. For example, dragging aRa_Barrel01.material on to the aRa_Barrel01 mesh has no effect, whilst dragging crate.material does work (except it's completely wrong). The dragon statue material (DragonStatue_00.material) has no effect on the dragon statue, but aRa_Barrel01.material works. In fact, just about every material except for the dragon statue works with dragon statue, including the lava material (aRa_Rock01_type2.material), which actually looks great, but doesn't solve the issue. If I drag DragonStatue_00.material back on to the model, it reverts to the pink and white chequerboard pattern.
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Re: Missing materials

Postby SolarPortal » 09 Feb 2015, 14:00

i get the same errors on my system, they are not errors though.
I think the problem you are seeing is a way our system works and got stuck with a few meshes which were a bad choice lol.

> If the material is the same name as the mesh file, it will try and load the base materials found in the .mesh file
e.g. "aRa_Barrel_01.mesh" contains a submesh requiring the material "barrel_Default", when viewed in the material editor.
When you drag the .mesh to the scene, it will look for a material file name that matches the .mesh name which usually holds the needed materials for that mesh. Which in this case it does find: "aRa_Barrel01.material".

When you open that file though, you find the material name "aRa_Barrel01", so the mesh cannot load the barrel material it wants as it does not exist in that file. The material here is a lone material that has been designed to drag on any surface.

There are 2 ways of handling materials in skyline

> Materials that are coupled with a mesh file(same name), like explained above. This single file can contain every material the mesh requires though that you set up in a modelling package.

> Materials that can be placed on any surface. These should never be the same name as the mesh file you are dragging onto. There should also never be more than 1 material inside that file though. Also the material in the file needs to match the name of the file itself in order to work properly, this is why you can drag any texture onto an object and save it off, then load it onto any surface.

When you drag "aRa_crate01.mesh" into the scene, it should come in textured (possibly big aswell). If you look for a material of the same name, you will find: "aRa_crate01.material", which is found.
When you look in the material editor for the name of the material the crate wants, you will find it looks for "Material#530", when looking in the material file, you will find that material name.
If this was like the barrel, and the material on the inside matched the name of the file, the crate would come in with a broken material.

The dragon statue for me though works, as the material file contains the correct material names associated with the sub mesh.

Hope this explanation helps a bit more. :D

Edit: We tend to drag the mesh, add a texture, save as material if there are material names not matching on meshes with singular materials. Then save a preset, which you will find all the barrels and crates work in the presets folde. If you look at the materials applied though, they are different.
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Re: Missing materials

Postby StarFire » 09 Feb 2015, 17:16

To simplify what SP wrote in the last post.

When creating a generic material, that is a material such as ground material or wall material that can be applied to any basic object eg. box for a wall. This gives a fast prototyping method so levels can have mock objects and place holders.

The other material method is the mesh material( material name the same as the mesh). This is the one that is created with the model. This mesh material can be replaced with a generic material at any time so long as you don't mind all sub meshes having the generic material applied.

This bring me to our work flow. We use presets all of the time!

This gives us much more flexibility than relying on the mesh files of other import formats.
For example I created a UV'ed barrel mesh. This mesh can then have a generic barrel material say one red, another blue.
Each of these materials can be individually dropped on the barrel mesh then save each as a separate preset.

eg:
* barrel mesh with red material - save as RedBarrel .preset
* barrel mesh with blue material - save as BlueBarrel.preset

This way you have only one barrel mesh, but can have as many different barrel presets as you wish. So much faster than making many barrel meshes with separate mesh materials!

The preset ethos is behind so much of Skylines rapid workflow and saves reinventing the wheel.

Remember each barrel can then have different damage systems attached and saved back to the preset ( or different preset ).
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Re: Missing materials

Postby Gtox » 09 Feb 2015, 17:28

Reading the above two explanations is making my brain hurt, but I'm beginning to understand (a bit). What I still don't understand is why the DragonStatue.material doesn't work when dragged on to the DragonStatue mesh. Or, to put it more generally, how to fix the issue of models having no materials. Even the ninja model, which does work when I drag the material across, has to be redone every time I start Skyline.
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Re: Missing materials

Postby TattieBoJangle » 09 Feb 2015, 17:33

Hi Gtox if you want to send me the model i can have a look at it and do a simple video tutorial to help you out if you like.
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Re: Missing materials

Postby StarFire » 09 Feb 2015, 17:44

lol dont want to hurt your brain!

Some model conversions can like anything digital have errors. But let us look a bit deeper.

Q - are you dragging in the dragon model from the asset manager or explorer?
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Re: Missing materials

Postby StarFire » 09 Feb 2015, 17:57

Found an error with the dragon statue looks like there was a corrupted file.

Here is a new version. Remove the old one and put this one in its place.

https://www.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk/downloads_common/Dragon%20Statue.zip

I also like this statue with the sstone2.material you can find it here: Asset Library/Materials/Ground n Floor
just drop it onto the model in the scene. remember if you like the model with the sstone2 material save the dragon as a preset.

Tip to get the best shadows, reduce the lights shadow distance to 20 .
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Re: Missing materials

Postby Gtox » 09 Feb 2015, 18:19

I'm dragging the models in from the asset manager.
I know I can get most of them to work with presets, and I'm not planning on using any of them in earnest in the near future, but it bugs me having all these misbehaving models :)
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Re: Missing materials

Postby Gtox » 09 Feb 2015, 18:27

I downloaded the new Dragon Statue files, and it now works, thanks. That's one down, 50 or so to go :)
Just out of interest, is the Dragon model supposed to have a material? There's no Dragon preset, just the Dragon mesh and a few jpegs.
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Re: Missing materials

Postby SolarPortal » 09 Feb 2015, 18:39

That is good that it works. :) Just shows to us there is no system fault.

This mesh was designed to have the material file the same as the mesh name, so all the required materials exist upon load in that 1 file. Since this mesh works out of the box, there is no need for a preset until you either:
> Use a different material on the mesh.
> Add dynamic content such as actions or scripts(Microscript or External).
> Scaled the mesh
> etc..

Although saying that, if we end up placing a lot of them in scenes, then we will create a preset and use that; because you can then make many variations all doing different things and can look different.

Note: The dragon statue has not been used often and when it has, it is a mesh that has been used for testing purposes only. :)
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Re: Missing materials

Postby Gtox » 09 Feb 2015, 20:15

I'm talking about the dragon now, not the dragon statue - it has no material file.
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Re: Missing materials

Postby StarFire » 09 Feb 2015, 21:05

Ah the dragon, that is one a few assets that should have been pruned from the release library. It fails due to the material "no space rule"

Assets with this issue need to currently have their sub mesh material names corrected and re-saved in order to fix them. There may be quite a few of the model assets that should be removed, from the library just another beta version task Most are just stand in assets until we can get a set of official Skyline assets from somewhere to provide with the engine.
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Re: Missing materials

Postby Gtox » 09 Feb 2015, 21:58

OK I'll just leave them for now. I wasn't planning to use them, I was just messing around, see what's there. Thanks for the help :)
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Re: Missing materials

Postby StarFire » 09 Feb 2015, 22:00

np :D
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