[Paul Roper]

Hi Mark,
I know this thread is a bit old, but I’m having a nightmare relinking textures in my project; the way C4D handles textures is appalling and feels more like version 1 than version 18. You said “select all the missing textures”…I can only select the textures one at a time in the Edit menu > Project Info > Textures panel. Is that where you’re selecting the textures?

I’ve set the project’s prefs to look at the proper folders, but C4D just ignores this completely – I’ve never seen any use in setting those folders in the prefs, it achieves absolutely nothing.

I seem to recall a better way to batch relink textures that I saw a year or so ago – not this silly Project Info > Textures way.

This is what I’m ploughing through:

…the procedure is:
1. click ‘Mark Missing Textures’ to show the green ticks and red crosses
2. click on a missing image file (eg. Person1_Top_Diffuse.png)
3. click on the … to locate the file
4. locate the file
5. click Yes when C4D asks if I want to replace it in the whole project
6. click OK when C4D tells me the texture’s been replaced
7. click ‘Mark Missing Textures’ to show the green ticks and red crosses
….and start on the next texture image.

There is no way to select more than one texture image in the list, even though they’re all in the same folder on my drive. Or is there a better, more efficient way?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

~ Paul

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

I found my way to this post searching around because I have the exact same problem.

Initially I did the same as you – turned off the transparency of each material. But those transparency maps are, in some cases, actually doing something useful. I found that they are inverted – the transparency maps generated by Fuse/Mixamo are, as you’d expect, white = opaque, black = transparent. But C4D seems to expect an inverted matte – the opposite of an alpha channel.

(I suppose you could apply the logic that a greyscale map works like this:
white = 100% “activate the thing”
black = 100% “inactive”
…so 100% white means “activate the transparency” and black = “turn off the transparency”, just as on a bump map, white = “activate the bump”. Maybe).

So, I found that inverting the textures did the job. There’s no one-click-invert way to do this, but instead of inverting the texture map in Photoshop, I set the black point and white point of the map to their opposite values (i.e. set black point to 1 and white point to 0). That inverts the image and fixes the texture. A bit of a pain to have to do this each time you import a model, to each texture. It’d be nice to see an “invert transparency maps” option when importing an .fbx model.

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

D’oh! So it does!

Thanks, Dan!

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

….but then again, that probably won’t work because I just need to exit the “for…” loop and continue to other parts of the expression, not “break” out of the whole expression. Is there some kind of “endloop” command?

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

Well, that was a quick fix.

findName = "Fred";
for (i =index; i <=thisComp.numLayers; ++i) {
if (thisComp.layer(i).name.indexOf(findName) != -1) {
i;
break;
}
}
The addition of “break” after the “// do what you need for this;” line (which in this case is to just return i, the layer number), stops the expression continuing to evaluate and search through the layers.

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

Perfect, thanks!!

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
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[Paul Roper]

In the end, I used a property mapper (a new comp with fractal noise and colorama on it).

But it seems there should be an easier way than this, especially if you want to use the property mappers for something else.

(I know the obvious answer would be “Use Trapcode Particular!” but I’ll need to hand off this project to someone without Particular.

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

Yep, that totally fixed it! Thanks Xavier!

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

PERFECT!

Thank you!!!!

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

I tried plucking bits from a previous script you’d created:
var mySelectedItems = [];
for (var i = 1; i <= app.project.numItems; i++){
if (app.project.item(i).selected)
mySelectedItems[mySelectedItems.length] = app.project.item(i);
}
for (var i = 0; i < mySelectedItems.length; i++){
var mySelection = mySelectedItems[i];
var myComp = app.project.items.addComp(mySelection.name, 1920, 1080, 1, mySelection.duration, 24);
var myLayer = myComp.layers.add(mySelection);
var myTransform = myLayer.Effects.addProperty("Transform");
myTransform.property(4).setValue(150);
}
and mashing it together with that one, without success. Scripting is indeed a very mysterious art, which makes expression-writing seem like a doddle in comparison!

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/