CompuServe Messages

I'm sure you can imagine why I lose sleep over things like this. I write 3D translators for a living, so I want to know exactly what happens because I can bet that a customer will discover what happens and blame the bugs on my conversion. 🙂 Within my translators, there is a list of materials, and each face can have one of those materials. I know how some of these multi-material objects were created by my translators. There's a program called Imagine. It uses triangles for everything, too. It doesn't have material lists, each face has its own set of material info. It even has a feature that randomly assigns colors to faces, so it quickly creates zillions of materials. So in this sense, my translator is always detaching faces and reassigning materials. Other situations could easily create more than 256 materials. For example, let's say my DXF translator could give each inserted BLOCK's entities a unique material. Each block might use three-four different pen numbers, and I'd create a unique material for each one: "DESK 1 RED" "DESK 2 RED" "DESK 3 RED", etc. Someone might want to be able to re-assign different materials to each block, right? The alternative is that all the blocks get mapped to the same three or four materials, and it's much harder to change the materials for a few of the blocks. And then there's that guy who's making 10,000 tree scenes… 🙂