Maxwell Render

If I take an object, apply a material and then flex it the material goes away... Seems to be connected to the fact that when an object is flexed it generates more faces...

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny ..."
Isaac Asimov

Sounds like SolidWorks is deleting the original object and not copying all of its data to the new one. Does it happen only when applied to faces/features, or is it also lost if applied to body/component? I'll take a look...

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Next Limit Team

I took the "flat" object, assigned materials to each face. The materials were there. I used "FLEX:TWIST" and the material was only on a couple of faces...

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny ..."
Isaac Asimov

Yes, it's like I thought - when you twist, SW is making a new object and it's not copying the plugin's material data from the old one to the new one. So basically, the workflow has to be: build object > modify > apply material. That is a super-cool image, by the way.

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Next Limit Team

Thanks!

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny ..."
Isaac Asimov

More on "FLEX".

I've been doing some experiments with using emitters with a flexed object (why you say? - because I'm bored)... Anyway - Flex makes a complete mess of things. The materials of the pre-flexed part don't propagate to the flexed part (which we've established). Once a part is flexed and you want to make it an emitter you have to apply the emitter to all faces, as we'd expect. See where I'm going? If you use Multi-light you wind up with a million sliders... I was able to crash (repeatedly) my scene with so many emitters (again, which we know).

Now, I have no idea why someone would want to do this for real.

I do have SW2009 Ultimate (yeah, I broke down)... I'm not using it with all my work yet. I don't know if doing this same thing is any different with SW2009. As I think about it this thought is raised; if you have a part and then do any kind of FEA analysis to the part you get a deformed part. You can save this as a new part. If you want to render both does this mean re-applying all the materials to the new faces? "Under the hood" is a deformed part from an analysis the same as a flexed part? I can see where this may be a real world problem.

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny ..."
Isaac Asimov

Firstly, you cannot apply emitters at the face/feature level, because they are not allowed on a multi-material object. More accurately, you can assign them, but they won't be exported, since MXCL would quit with an error; a substitute material will be assigned instead.

About deformation in general, where the changes made do not require the creation of new faces, it would be logical for SW to copy the attributes from the source faces to the destination faces. If it required the splitting of faces, then you would be looking at a 'best-guess' scenario, since it would not be possible for SW to determine your intention. As we see in this topic though, it looks like SW is just dropping that data no matter how complex the operation. That's how it looks to be working with flex; it is possible that other deformation tools would behave differently.

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Next Limit Team