instObjGroups

# 1 16-01-2015 , 01:50 PM

Registered User
Join Date: Jan 2015

Posts: 2

Longtime XSI user, now living in the realm of Maya. (I picked Maya over Max, because it felt more like XSI after a 30 day trial - and am now forcing myself to learn the software as I go on projects - luckily most of projects are basic mechanical animations and motion graphics pieces)

I've converted a Solidworks assembly in Polytrans and exported as OBJ. In XSI, the OBJ would have the different materials on a surface as clusters that I can easily apply a new material to. In XSI, I could select the clusters and easily redefine them or remove them as needed.

In Maya, (as a complete newbie), I'm trying to understand how these materials are attached to the model. I can see the materials in Hypershade that correspond to the different materials on the surface (actually it appears to create a shading group for each of the imported materials). In outliner, I also see something called "instObjGroups" with a collection of children that appear to correspond to the materials as well. Since these instObjGroups and children are greyed out, it doesn't appear I can do anything with them directly - my expectation was that I select one and the polygons associated with it would be highlighted in the scene.

In an ideal world, I'd love to be able to select the instObjGroups (which I'm interpreting as what XSI would call a cluster) - group these clusters and apply a material to that group.

Is it possible to see shading groups and materials in the Outliner view - I'm hoping to find the equivalent to the "Explorer" view in XSI. I see materials in the Relationship Editor in Render Layers mode - but nothing appears to be connected as I would expect.

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# 2 16-01-2015 , 02:08 PM

EduSciVis-er
Join Date: Dec 2005

Location: Toronto

Posts: 3,374

How materials are connected to objects is one of the things in Maya that is not as transparent (no pun intended) as it could be. The outliner is not a good way to handle materials. The hypershade, on the other hand, is.
A couple ways that are typically used to go between materials and polygons are:
1) In the hypershade, you can see all your materials. If you RMB and swipe right on a material, you can "Select Objects with Material" whether that is whole objects or polygons within an object.
2) If you select an object, in the attribute editor you will find tabs corresponding to the materials applied to that object.
3) If you RMB on an object and select Material Attributes... you will get the attributes of the material applied to the object (doesn't work with materials applied to components).
4) In the hypershade, select a material, and graph it. Then select the shading group node (which controls the relationship between a material and objects) and graph that (Graph > Input and Output connections). Then you can see the geometry that has the material applied.

I hope that helps. Good luck and welcome to Maya and SimplyMaya.

-stwert

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-->How to Effectively Ask Questions on Forums<--

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# 3 16-01-2015 , 03:09 PM

Registered User
Join Date: Jan 2015

Posts: 2

Thanks, that helped alot. I'm getting the impression that Maya is a bit more segmented in workflow than what I've been used to. I do like that there is a much larger community for assistance than XSI (I hated doing google searches for XSI, it seemed I got Honda cars more often than not)

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