Is there a shortcut to selecting multiple surfaces - including clothing?
So I'm working with Genesis and Bot Genesis. When working with textures, let's say I want to be able to select all the skin surfaces easily. So I figured out how to use Edit Surface Selection Sets so I can do that, but it only works for one figure as far as I can tell. Is there any way to select the skin surfaces on Gensis and on the bot attachments? I can go through and select everything by hand and it takes about 2 minutes, but I'd rather not keep doing that whenever I want to change something, plus there's also the chrome surfaces, glowing surfaces, etc.
On a side note, is there a way to search or filter what surfaces display in the surfaces tab. If I could search for all skin or chrome, that would work too.
Edit: And of course, right after I create the thread, I find a forum with a possible solution. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3349416/#Comment_3349416 . It isn't the solution I wanted, but it's better than what I'm doing now. Mods, you can delete this post if you want.
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Comments
To answer the initial question - its easy with multible selected items.
Just Ctrl+click all figures or other items in the Scene Pane or the Viewport then go to the Surface pane and they show up there at least for me. There are also settings what to show and when in the Surface pane options menu. The Settings are Display Selcted Only, Display Selcted and Fitted Items (this is the default I guess) and Display All.
But to apply a shader or material to a single surface with Ctrl+doubleClick from the library you have to take care of selecting only one figure/item.
Right, I got the Ctrl+click part, but for Genesis with the Bot Genesis addon, there are a lot of surfaces to scroll through. If I want to change all the metal surfaces, then I have to go through all 15 bot gen parts(ankle, foot, elbow, etc) and look for the metal surfaces. It's tedious to go through and select each of those every time I want to change something. But as I learned in the forum thread I linked above, I can right click the figure in the scene and it gives the option to Select All Surfaces with a Value of ____. So that's probably the best option for now.
Hmm, currently I have the same problem with my star wars storm trooper armor props parented to the figure.
I would like to know how to assign tags to materials, as far as I know once the materials have tags assigned you can search and use the filter box in the Surface pane.
So my question is: how to assign tags to materials? And can I use the filter box with multible items selected to get all materials with a given tag. Example given: select all scene items and in Surface pane enter "metal" in the filter box to have all surfaces of all items with the tag "metal" selected.
OK I guess I found it, just had to write "site:daz3d.com how to assign tags to materials" into goolge and was following the search results.
You have to select the Surface(s) of the selected items in the Surfaces pane and simply write a tag word into the tag property text field - multible tags possible I guess seperated by a comma. Now that you have assigned tags you can use a script to select all Surfaces of all items in the scene with the given tag.
Scripting » API Reference » Samples » Materials » Select by Tag
I just checked it and now I see there is an option in the Surface Selection tool with the right-click on an object with a surface. The menu entry is called Select Surfaces with the Tags. However it only showes up in the menu with a right-click on an surface that has already a tag assigned - I think that is what they call context sensitive :P
But once it shows up it has the option to select not just surfaces with the same tag on the current item but also on all items in the scene.
But thinking of the time it takes to give every material a tag, at the same time you can also select those surfaces manualy. I guess the tags gets saved with the material preset to use it with the same item in another scene.
The bigger the amount of scene items gets the more reasonable using tags gets. Heared its also useful for shader conversions 3DL<->iRay.
Yeah, that tag thing works for me. Converting to a different shader seems to wipe out the tags, but I can just assign a new tag while I still have the things selected. Thanks. This is going to be a huge time saver.
You can also create sets of surfaces, as seen in the recent Genesis figures. From the Surfaces pane option menu (the lined button in the top corner, or right-click the tab) open the Edit Surface Selection Sets dialogue, use the Add button to add a new set, with the set name seelcted check the surfaces you want to add in the list on the right.