Need some help exporting a figure as an OBJ

SLoTH_XVX

I am hoping someone would be kind enough to help me understand how to expot a figure as an OBJ with clothing along with the texture files.

I have succesfully 'converted' a figure to OBJ with clothing including the MTL file but when I load into another program the textures are not carried over. 

Richard Haseltine

So this is about materials, not exporting the OBJ itself? The mtl file is quite limited in the infromation it will carry, and applications are not entirely consistent about how they read the mtl file anyway so that even the limited information may not carry across. If you are using a relatively advanced set of materials (Iray, or soemthing like the AoA SSS shader for 3delight) there's probably no point in even trying to use the MTL file - just rebuild the materials in the destination application.

nicstt

The few times I wanted textures and wasn't using one of the scripts, I exported as a Collada (.dae); the textures were created in a folder. I seem to remember FBX does the same, but when using 3D in photoshop it has to be Collada it seems and not fbx.

Bejaymac

The problem is that the OBJ importer on your other program has no idea where to find the textures listed in the MTL.

Most OBJ importers start looking for the textures from the location of the OBJ/MTL they are loading, as an example if you export an OBJ to "Documents" then chances are the MTL will have pathways starting "/Runtime/Textures/", so unless you actually have a Runtime folder in "Documents" then the importer is never going to find them.

So you have three choices.

First choice, stick the OBJ/MTL in the same content directory that the Runtime folder is in.

Second choice, edit the pathways in the MTL, in this case they will have to be the full pathway including the drive letter of the HDD.

Third choice, on the OBJ exporter there is an option to "collect maps", this will make a copy of all of the available textures on the figure, it will place them inside a folder called Maps in the same location you exported the OBJ to, the pathways in the MTL will point to that folder.

There is one issue with any of this though, almost all of the shaders we use are incompatible with the surface settings in an MTL file, it just doesn't recognise almost all of the channels we use in the those shaders, as a result all that's likely to be in the MTL is the Diffuse texture and possibly any Opacity maps, so you are still going to be looking for textures no matter what you do.