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Material name prefix so it doesn't show in the material list
When you create furniture for use in Sweet Home 3D you can add hinges and rails for deformations. Especially rails are often hidden inside the furniture and thus invisible for the user. These rails have no use other than being a rail for deformations. They are not part of the design. Of course you can create it as an invisible object by setting a d value of 0 in the MTL file but it still has a material name that you see in the Modify furniture dialog material list. The user can see and change this but of course it's useless because you can't see it. For beginner users that can be confusing. (I often hide a single face rail/hinge inside another part if an existing face is not available for use as a rail/hinge.)
What I would like to have is a material name prefix like "sweethome3d_hidden_" or "sweethomet3d_invisible_" where it handled just like any other material but because of the prefix is not shown in the Modify furniture material list. With export it should be exported just like any other visible material. With this the user doesn't see a material name that he cannot see anyway and that has no reason to change color. Basically a prefix that means "Don't show it to the user in the material list".
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Netherlands
Joined: Apr 8, 2022
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Re: Material name prefix so it doesn't show in the material list
Yes, it's an excellent idea, but is it feasible?
I think it is and it could even be easy. Just check the material names when the UI list is created and skip those with the mentioned prefix.
It all depends on how the list is used after it is created. A 'missing' material name might interfere with the correct execution of other functions in the Modify furniture dialog. Once that dialog is closed everything should be the same as before and the hidden/invisible part is untouched.
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Netherlands
Joined: Apr 8, 2022
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Re: Material name prefix so it doesn't show in the material list
Or maybe the model could be automatically imported as a "group", so you get just one line in the material list.
That wouldn't work. A group is something entirely different from a material or a model. It isn't even related to materials. That Sweet Home 3D creates separate groups for materials doesn't mean that the obj file is constructed that way. The whole file represents the model. You could have a model exported from Blender with only a single object (o line) and no groups (g lines) and still have different materials on the model. That's very common. What I wished for has to do with the way materials are listed in the UI when you modify furniture materials. Some materials are invisible to the user, for example a hinge that is hidden inside another part or an invisible box to expand the bounding box. Those are materials I would like to be kept out of the list because there's no sense in changing those materials. Of course they should stil export with the model, just not show in the UI.
That wouldn't be too hard to implement if you think about the same system that is used for deformations: a sweethome3d_* prefix but now not on a group but on a material name (usemtl line). A material name like 'sweethome3d_nolist_TheMaterialName' could be detected by the prefix just like deformations are found using the prefixes and skipped when the list for the UI is populated (but remain in the model material list).
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