I’m working on a project which involves importing an FBX file (exported from blender) which I would then like to modify in TD.
After importing it, the hierarchy looks like the following:
FBX
↓
GEOs 1, 2, 3, etc.
↓
GEOs 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc.
↓
Import Select Mesh 1.1.1, Bone Group 1.1.1, Null 1.1.1, Phong 1.1.1
What I would like to do, is to make changes directly to the GEOs 1, 2, 3, etc., but it doesn’t seem to be an option, as making changes to their parameters do not seem to result in any visible changes.
The only thing that seems to work is to modify the meshes at the very bottom of the hierarchy, but with what I would like to do in my case, it would mean to make way too many modifications to get the changes I want.
Is there a way to make it so that the changes made to the GEOs just under the FBX work? Did I maybe missed a step in my import process? Or do I need to make a script to make it work the way I want?
Sorry if the answer is obvious, I couldn’t find anything relevant when searching…
Ok, after trying other things, it seems I made wrong assumptions on the behavior of the FBX comp…
I now realized that the parameters I was trying to modify in the Geo COMPs as “examples”, which were the Scale or the Translate parameters, were tied to the armature of the object and for this reason would never have an impact on the Geo COMP itself.
So, now that I understood that (or at least I think I did), my end goal would be to be able to modify the alpha of every major Geo COMP (the direct children to the FBX) individually.
I tried to do it by either, 1) changing the alpha of the Phong MATs at the bottom of the hierarchy, or 2) connecting every Geo COMP that are parents to those MATs to another Phong MAT and then changing the alpha of that MAT. (I first tried doing the same thing with the Geo COMPs that are direct children to the FBX but it didn’t work)
The No.1 worked without any problem, but since there are hundreds and hundreds of those and that I want this alpha parameter to be able to be modified easily at the end, it doesn’t seem to be ideal…
The No.2 seems more convenient, but doing so breaks the links between the Geo COMPs and the armature of the object, which is not an option since the 3D model needs to move at the end…
Is there a way to make one of the above work by either tying every MATs to a single MAT of which I can change the parameters as I wish, or by keeping the links intact after connecting the Geo COMPs to the new MAT?
Or is there another way that I cannot think of that would be more suitable in that case?
There’s likely no way to consolidate them to a single MAT, as the geos are separate for a reason, and it’s probably because they have different material properties or deforms. If they all had the same material then the importer could itself merge them all into a single Geo COMP.
The best way I can think to do this (assuming you want to control them with a single value), is to add an alpha custom parameter to your FBX COMP, then modify the onImport callback script to set any Phong MAT’s alpha value to that of the parent FBX COMP, as a python expression. See below one possible option for a script, and it also gives you an idea as to what’s possible.
def onImport(comp, allOps, newOps):
for c in allOps:
if c.OPType == 'phongMAT':
c.par.alphafront.expr = parent.FBX.par.Alpha
return
Note: this assumes you’ve already added a custom parameter named Alpha to your FBX COMP.
The script was kind of the solution I was looking for! After trying to slightly modify it, I managed to get the result I was looking for.
Still need to figure out a few other things but it shouldn’t be that hard now.