lightworks materials

[Maged Ibrahim]

hello to all of you,
does anyone know how can we use the lightworks materials that we can download them from lightworks users site?

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Can the group of lightworks early adopters offer a list of "must-have" lwas from the ones available at the Lightworks User site?

[Karl Ottenstein]

Aaron wrote:
Can the group of lightworks early adopters offer a list of "must-have" lwas from the ones available at the Lightworks User site?

That's a tough one, Aaron, since each person's needs are different. (The Mannington floors probably aren't very useful to most though! 😉 )

The little experimentation that I've done has shown at least one material in each lwa to be of interest. What I've been wondering is how LWA's are created and edited, since I'd love to prune out the materials that I don't need and create a combined LWA with the stuff that I like. I suppose if I search the LW-user site I could find the answer .... feeling lazy...

Karl

PS As an aside, I'll note that it gets confusing when you assign materials from the LWA and then work in OpenGL, since of course the OpenGL materials are the ones from the Internal Engine (more or less). There's a button to make LW "match internal engine", but none to make OpenGL 'match LW'. You can end up with some pretty extreme stuff, like seeing brick in OpenGL and stucco (anything) from LW.

[Dwight]

It seems to be a manual operation to work backwards - at least your basic material texture should be the same in all three rendering types - I have found this to be good practice - no surprises.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

I'm going to post one of use to North American users - Benjamin Moore's paint colours have been posted today. Since we don't seem to make use of the RAL colour standard, this one might make paint specifying easier. ???

Benjamin Moore Paints

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Do ArchiCAD 9 users have "base" functionality or "architectural" functionality?

signed,

an archicad intern

[Karl Ottenstein]

Aaron wrote:
I'm going to post one of use to North American users - Benjamin Moore's paint colours have been posted today. Since we don't seem to make use of the RAL colour standard, this one might make paint specifying easier. ???

Benjamin Moore Paints

That'll definitely be useful for me... Thanks for announcing, Aaron! 😉

The preview button results are interestingly bad. For example, semi-gloss and gloss are increasingly mirror-like ... but don't look like any gloss painted wall I've seen: needs noise and a minor bump to distort the reflection (hmm: does a bump map distort the reflection in LW? Will have to try.)...

Now, grumble, to download each lwa one by one, since there is not mass download...

OK... back to edit this message: I just downloaded 3 (and stopped) of the Benjamin Moore lwa's, and none of them display any materials when loaded into ArchiCAD ... so I'm wondering if the lwa's themselves are defective?

I've tried:

BenjaminMooreRegal221InteriorMatte
BenjaminMooreRegal333InteriorSemiGloss
BenjaminMooreRegal221InteriorEggshell

Nothing at all comes up for any of these. I'm dropping an email to LW to ask what the problem is, but maybe it's me. (I'm also astonished that an archive for paint is over 4 MB ... so maybe there are some bump maps/etc in there.)

Karl

[Dwight]

So, LightWorks can make s*h*i*t*t*y textures, too!

An archive to avoid is the UNS metals. All the same.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Karl,


when you wrote:

Yes, one of those not-very-obvious things...

Download the *.lwa (lightworks archive) files ... and place them into the following folder alongside the standard ArchiCAD LW archives:

[XP path]:
Program Files\Graphisoft\ArchiCAD 9\Add-Ons\Visualization\smdata

After that (no reload of libraries or anything required), click the buttons as shown in the Materials dialog screenshot below.

There seem to be some initialization files that reside inside this folder as well. Does installation of some or all the LWAs require a modification to the initialization files?

[Karl Ottenstein]

Followup on Benjamin Moore LWA files not working with AC 9:

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=26218#26218

[Karl Ottenstein]

Aaron wrote:
There seem to be some initialization files that reside inside this folder as well. Does installation of some or all the LWAs require a modification to the initialization files?

Only one I see is the shaders.lob file and I can't find what it's function is ... other than a reference indicating that it is an essential file.

Mystery.

Karl