New Zealand
Joined: Dec 28, 2014
Post Count: 95
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General Change Texture Plugin
I've recently spent some time revisiting my code for the Change Texture Plugin (announced in this old forum posting).
I've just uploaded a new plugin - the General Change Texture Plugin. This new plugin generalizes the ability to find and change textures for all furniture, furniture materials, wall sides, room ceilings, room floors, and wall baseboards.
The plugin is useful in those situations where you want to trial different finishes for a large number of items. For example: choosing the right stain for refinishing all timber features; selecting a common stone for all bench-tops; or choosing which wallpaper to use to several rooms. The plugin is also useful for determining and tidying up which textures are in use.
The plugin can find and change both catalog and non-catalog textures. Non-catalog textures are often (always?) furniture default materials. When a default material is changed, the actual default remains unaffected, but it is overridden by creating an instance specific material (just as in SH3D proper).
This plugin is very new and I've used it much less than the old plugin. Definitely take a backup copy of your home model before using it.
Here's a screenshot:
The texture handling code is almost all new (partly based on the the Global Color Change plugin). It uses a heuristic to select whether to identify a texture match by texture-name, material-name, or catalog-id. This seems to work OK for my own models and tests. Normally texture-names have priority. For furniture default-materials, the material-names have priority. Should the names lack values, it will fallback to catalog-ID.
The user interface is relatively unchanged from the original plugin. It does now have an About button. It is also now aware of undo/redo for it's own operations. It is not aware of changes make outside of the plugin, but using the "Show all" or "Show used" right-mouse actions will force it to rewalk and incorporate outside changes (and you can always close and reopen the plugin). As before, the undo/redo actions appear under the main SH3D edit menu.
One limitation I've noticed is that if the plugin is brought up while the home is still loading the plugin can wind up with an incomplete view of what's in use.
