Slide 3 - Working With Materials

This exercise teaches you to work with material and texture palettes.

Sorting The Textures

This series of instructions teaches you how to sort out the textures/materials and externalize the textures.

Examine the hierarchy.
Left click the first material node.
Choose Select » Select Nodes Of Same Type from the main menu.
This selects all the material nodes.
Left click the material node named grass_texture and drag it over the group node named Materials.
Release the left mouse button when the Materials group highlights.
Left click the small + to the left of Materials.
Change the name of the group node named Scene to Landscape.

This series of instructions teaches you how to externalize the textures and implement relative paths.

Examine the hierarchy.
Double click the first texture node.
This displays texture node properties in the browser.
Set Texture Is External to True.
Examine the hierarchy.
Right click over the selected first texture node and select Texture: Use Relative Path from the listed options.
Repeat this procedure to set each texture node to External and to use a relative path.
Double click the first texture.
This time the path reads ..\TEXTURES.
Check each texture.
The path ..\TEXTURES means the texture node looks for the texture by moving up one directory and then looking for a directory named \TEXTURES that contains the actual raster image files. This is correct.

This series of instructions teaches you how to format skybox materials.

Examine the hierarchy.
Left click the material node named sky_texture_side_01.
Hold down SHIFT and left click the material node named sky_texture_side_05.
This selects the list of materials between the first material and last material.
Right click over the selected nodes and select Properties from the listed options.
This displays material properties in the property editor.
This operation will edit all the materials in the selection but only the parameters that you actually change. All the other parameters, which may be unique to each material, will be left alone.
Scroll down to the Colors property group.
Set Ambient Color to pure white. This is a skybox and it needs to be full-bright.
Scroll down to the Hidden Surface Removal property group.
Set Material Is Two-Sided to True.
It is convenient to use full-bright, two-sided materials on skyboxes. It is also convenient for seagulls to fly through the air.
Save the file and leave Scenome running. Proceed to the next exercise or use this as a save point.