This page provides information on material setup in Chaos Anima.


Materials

Both 3ds Max and Cinema 4d have material converters that will handle the shaders and adapt them to the renderer that is detected as active in your 3D application when the models are loaded. The converter works by checking the names of the sub-materials and comparing them to those saved in the material library that corresponds to your active renderer. When the names match, the shader stored in the library is used as a template for all the incoming models and then is completed with each actor’s texture. The material names that the plugin uses by default are:

  • Hair
  • Head
  • Eyes&Mouth
  • Skin
  • Cloths&Stuff


Any character imported with sub-materials that use these names will have their standard materials automatically converted to shaders that are appropriate for the active renderer. The Anima actors use a single Multi/Sub-object material and there’s no limit on the number of sub-materials. Please note that inside the Anima standalone application you can create color variations for each shader of the actor, refer to this article for more information about this process.

All the material libraries used as templates are located in the folder:

<max install path>\scripts\aXYZ\MaterialLibrary

The templates are organized using a filename with the renderer name and the Multi suffix and saved as Material Library format. If you open this in your 3d application you will see two materials (names may change depending on the renderer):

  • Actors (Multi/Sub-object): Used for human characters.
  • Escalator (Multi/Sub-object): Used for the escalators generated inside Anima.


Workflow

To see how this works, let’s imagine that we want to add a new V-Ray preset to the multi-material for a character that has a different shader for his hands (maybe he’s wearing gloves!). To do this:

  1. Open the Material Editor and load the Material Library called V-Ray_multi.mat
  2. Drag the Actors material to an empty slot so it can be edited.
  3. Add an additional sub-material, the order is not important because the converter uses names, not the IDs.




4. Click on the empty slot and create new material for the hands. You can create any setup you like, but to determine how the original textures are used you must name them based on the map slot names of a Standard material. For example.




5. In this way, the textures can be easily and automatically reassigned in the new V-Ray material preset. Any other map types can be used, as long as the texture inputs use this naming convention the converter will know where they should be placed.
6. The Multi/Sub-object material now has a third entry called Hands. We can save this to the library and when a character is imported that uses a material with the same name, it will be converted to a V-Ray compatible material using this shader tree as a template.



Footnotes

In Anima versions prior to 3.5.4, if a texture is missing then all the maps for the input slot are also removed.

Since version 3.5.4, if a texture is missing then Anima will generate a 2-pixel dummy texture to keep compatibility with all the autogenerated shaders for all the different Render Engines supported.