Textures no longer assigned to materials?

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I have some Maya files that I am trying to export to Blender. They are fairly large and contain many VRAY materials and textures. I have tried exporting with both .obj and .fbx. The material settings like roughness and spec and color seem to come through just fine, but none of the materials had any textures. Note that it was not simply a case of the texture file being in the wrong place or having a broken path. The materials did not seem to think that they had textures at all.

So in Maya, I tried rendering, and realized that the textures were not working in Maya either! (other material properties were). I checked in Hypershade and I can see that the Texture files are there in the texture tab, but in the Materials tab, everything is just black. I know almost nothing about Maya, but from what I've gathered, this means that the textures are no longer assigned to the materials. The person I got the files from said that they ought to be, but thinks that the new version of Maya has broken them somehow. When I send the same file to others who use Maya, they are also broken for them.

Is there anything I can do to fix this? I need to somehow get the textures properly re-assigned to the materials they were on before. Is this a known issue with versions, or would something else have broken them? As I said, these files are large (city scapes and lots of buildings) with hundreds of textures, so I can't easily go re-assign them manually. And since these came from some city generator or another, the material and textures are not named in such a way that I can tell what's supposed to go with what.

Any ideas as to how I can approach solving this problem? Thank you!

[damaggio]

Hi Colin, Vray materials cannot be exported by using an OBJ or FBX format, You need to reassign manually whatever didn't make thru the conversion.

You could however try at least to repath the textures Windows>General Editors>File path editor...make sure to read Docs before attempting to use it.

[Anonymous]

Thank you! Would this let me find which textures had been associated with which materials? As long as I can find what that is, I can re-assign in Blender with a script or something. I just need to know what texture belongs in what material.

Are there any formats that can make an export of VRAY materials? I don't actually need any of the material parameters to come through. I just need the correct texture in the correct place.

I'll check out the documentation.

[Anonymous]

I have tried the re-path tool, and it worked! It looks like the image folder was just wrong. So now the textures are working again within Maya, but I still have the problem of how to export this in such a way that they come through to Blender.

[damaggio]

Fbx and obj can only export textures and simple shaders like blinds and Lambert’s , to export with Vray to Blender you might look into exporting and importing a vrscene ... in Maya under Translator Vray render settings Common tab.

[Anonymous]

I only need the textures. I'm not using any of the other shader settings, as I'll be re-doing it all with Cycles in Blender. I just need the correct textures in the correct places.

I notice that when I use the export option on the main file menu, then I get no textures. But there's also an export menu in Hypershade. When I do a .obj export there, it will export all the geometry and a single texture if I have a material selected. When I import into blender, it seems to have put that same texture on all the materials that have textures. If I select multiple materials within Hypershade, it still only exports 1 texture.

[damaggio]

I see, well I can’t think of anything else to suggest, maybe get 2 more people in the studio to help you reassign everything back in Blender.

sorry Colin. Good luck.