Joined: Jul 16, 2024
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Adding colourable areas to models.
I've got a few models that apply colours or textures to the whole model. I'm looking for a way to label parts of the model to be coloured individually. So that a handle could be a different colour to the rest of a cabinet, for instance.
But I don't know what software I'd need or what this would be called in order to google it.
Any suggestions for software or search terms would be appreciated. Thanks
Netherlands
Joined: Apr 8, 2022
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Re: Adding colourable areas to models.
Unfortunately this is not something that Sweet Home 3D can do. Blender can do this easily but you have to be familiar with it because it's not the easiest software. On the other hand it's worth learning it because it can do almost anything you want with 3D models. For the coloring you can import the model in Blender and set colors to individual faces if you want to, or of course select a set of faces like the handle and set a different material name and color for it. Once done export it to .obj and you can import it in Sweet Home 3D again and you will have the new material names available.
ETA: If you are lucky your model is an object file (obj) and it has multiple groups in it (lines starting with 'g '). If that is the case check the manuals page on dodecagon.nl which has a manual to change material names. Each g line is followed by a line with 'usemtl <materialname> so you probably have multiple lines with 'usemtl default' or something like that. You can change each usemtl line with a a unique name and add a block in the accompanying .mtl file for each name. After import in Sweet Home 3D you should have all material names available. You can also check that there actually IS a .mtl file and that the name of the file is referenced correctly in the .obj file (close to the top a line that starts with 'mtllib <mtl-file-name>). If you imported another format you can try and export it from Sweet Home 3D to the obj format and open the files with a plain text editor.
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last edit by Keet at Jul 16, 2024, 7:18:19 PM]
Joined: Jul 16, 2024
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Re: Adding colourable areas to models.
Yes that's resolved it. You were right about the possible absence of a .mtl with the original .obj
when I import the .obj to blender the materials are already there. I can immediately export with no changes which creates a .obj and .mtl file. Then when I import into sweet home 3d the materials will then show up.
