Controlling material names during a Collada export

[YoderW]

Hey all,

 

Is there a way to control what Chief names each material as it's importing a model as a collada (.dae) file?

 

At my company, we use Chief to build the base model and then export as a collada file to import into Lumion to render. Lumion's latest version has the ability to automatically replace materials with "glass" or "water" in the name with those kinds of materials when importing, but for some reason Chief will randomly assign names to materials during the collada export process like "mat127-material," regardless of what they are named in the material settings. Other export processes will keep the material names, but those have their own problems in Lumion. The 3DS format, for example, is the best alternative, but it changes the scale of the model. 

 

I can't seem to find anywhere in the preferences to mess with export settings, though. It's nothing that totally breaks our workflow, as it only takes a couple seconds to replace the material, but it would be a nice little quality-of-life feature we could take advantage of if we could get Chief to cooperate. 

[Chopsaw]

Sorry there is no known way to get chief to keep these organized and I believe they are numbered in the order they are use in the plan file so each plan file will be different.

 

You can however edit the .dae file but it is a lot of work and needs to be totally redone for each little revision.

 

Exporting to other programs creates the same and sometimes larger problems so unless someone gives a better answer than I did, please proceed to the suggestion forum.

[YoderW]

13 hours ago, Chopsaw said:

Sorry there is no known way to get chief to keep these organized and I believe they are numbered in the order they are use in the plan file so each plan file will be different.

 

You can however edit the .dae file but it is a lot of work and needs to be totally redone for each little revision.

 

Exporting to other programs creates the same and sometimes larger problems so unless someone gives a better answer than I did, please proceed to the suggestion forum.

 

That's okay. That's what I thought, but I figured it was worth a shot to ask. Thank you!

[Chopsaw]

On 11/6/2019 at 4:54 PM, YoderW said:

Chief will randomly assign names to materials during the collada export process like "mat127-material," regardless of what they are named in the material settings.

 

On way you may be able to beat the system with this issue is that once a material has been added to Plan Materials I believe that it keeps it's assigned number.  I have not thoroughly tested this so it is just a theory at this point but I think it might be worth trying.

So once you have a comprehensively organized Plan Material listing your required edits may be minimized.

 

Let us know if this works for multiple projects as it sounds like you are doing quite a few.