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160 Chapter 5: Creating Geometry
Ho wever, you can drag the color from one material
to the color clipboard, switch to the other material,
and then drag the color from the clipboard to the
swatch in the new material.
You c an save and load color clipboard files. The
saved file, which is given a
.ccb (color clip board)
extension, is an ASCII file that contains a palette
description. The first 12 lines of the file consist of
three RGB numbers, so you can easily edit or create
your ow n clipboard files. This file format is also
used by the
VertexPaint modifier (page 1–918) .
Procedure
To copy a color fr om a swatch to the color clipboard:
1.
On the Utilit ies panel, click Color Clipboard.
2. Open the Material Editor.
3. Select a color from any swatch in a material.
4. Drag the color to a swatch in the color
clipboard.
5. A dialog appears asking if you want to copy or
swap the material. Choose copy to replace t he
swatch in the color clipboard with the swatch
from the material you selected. Choose swap
to swap colors on the Color Clipboard swatch
and material swatch.
Inter face
Co lor swatches—Click a color swatch to edit its
value with the Color Selector.
Note: The Color Selector invoked by this utility
uses decimal numbers in the range 0.0 to 1.0,
instead of integers in the range 0 to 255 as with
other color-selection dialogs in 3ds Max.
New Flo ater —Displays a floating clipboard with 12
slots, plus buttons for opening and saving color
clipboardfiles.Youcanopenupasmanyofthese
floaters as you want and you can minimize them.
If you exit the Utilities panel or select the Close
button to exit the Color Clipbo ard utility, any
visible floaters remain open. When you close a
floater, any changed values are lost.
Clo se—Exits the Clipboard utility.
Adjusting Normals and
S moothi ng
In general, you adjust nor mals and smo othing to
prepare objects for rendering.
A
normal (page 3–1074) is a unit vector that
defines which way a face or vertex is pointing. The
directioninwhichthenormalpointsrepresents
thefront,oroutersurfaceofthefaceorvertex,
which is the side of the surface that is normally
displayed and rendered.
Yo u c a n m a n u a l l y f l i p o r u n i f y
face normals to fix
surfaceerrorscausedbymodelingoperationsor
by importing meshes from other programs .