Collada export to Cinema 4D

pep75

Dear SU-pers,

When I export my models to Cinema 4d(in the one and only, praise the lord....allmost) collada-extension I lose all of my given material names. If this can be solved I'll be the happiest person in the world. Does anyone have a solution for it?!

Thanks in advance!
Greetings
Pep

Gaieus

Hi Pep,

This is the "new" collada export "feature" unfortunately. The reason is that there have been many problems with material naming conventions (a lot of apps do not tolerate accented characters, spaces and such) therefore the "decision" to make it easier.

Yes, I know this is a hell for those who would like to work with their meaningfully "named" materials. As far as I remember, version 5 exported with material names retained last time. Unfortunately the only (officially) available SU 5 version is the Pro at Google but when that expires, it will NOT revert to the free version on one hand and it also needed a GE exporter to generate the kmz/collada file.

There should be an option to "preserve texture names" in the exporter.

pep75

Thanks Gaieus for your very very complete answer!! Well, what you suggest should be in it! That there's an option whether you want to keep the material names. At the moment I'll have to puzzle every time there's an update of a plan to find out wich material belongs where. Very annoying and amateurish I guess. But there hasn't been an update for the collada plugin anywhere or a tool(I've been searching and I couldn't find any by the way)? The collada exporter has THE advantage that it generates instances in C4D...

Gaieus

When this feature came out, we immediately indicated that (especially now as Google hopes to get collada to be a "universal translation file type between many apps), this material thing will cause a lot of issues.

You can do one thing however;

rename your materials after the export
run a batch-rename operation in the collada file (as it is a simple text file, you can edit it in a text editor)
It's just an annoying, additional extra step (especially if you have a lot of materials).

pep75

Thanks Gaius, I'm going to try that.........
grtzzzzz
Pep