Creating a hypershade library swatch

[lapdog]

Reading through the posts here, a proceedure for creating a swatch for a personal hypershade library material icon is detailed below. My question - is their an easier way to do this? Seems rather tedious when you are downloading a dozen shaders.

1. In perspective viewport,

   a. create sphere
   b. frame sphere and zoom in until sphere fills viewport

2. In perspective camera attribute editor

   a. Set enviormental background color to white

3. In hypershade

   a. Import library material into material tab
   b. Assign material to sphere

4. In Render Globals

   a. Set resolution to custom 64x64
   b. Unlock device aspect ratio
   Device and Pixel Aspect Ration should be 1.0
   c. Set Anti-aliasing quality to Production

5. In render view

   a. Render swatch
   b. Zoom in on swatch for easier selection
   c. Select from menu View | Grab swatch to hypershade/visor
   d. Draw outline around swatch
   e. MMB drag selection to library icon swatch

This creates a ./.mayaSwatches/Xray.iff.swatch file

[rifz]

There is a swatch making mel script here, that can do batch, It took me some messing around to get it working. Make sure all your shareders are have all needed plugins, or the script will just stop and not tell you there's a error or anything..

also if you goto the Denfo shader site (see the shader section for the link) you can download his shader test scene that he uses.

[lapdog]

Thank-you for pointing out the script. It sometimes works, especially if you are careful to import just one material into your prepared test scene. It sometimes hangs requiring a restart of Maya.

When it works, it beats the manual method hands down. Still, the entire process is tedious and make you wonder if the developers just forgot this one. I mean you can see the swatch in Hypershade and in the attribute editor. Wonder if there is a way to get to it through mel?

The denfo site is not available today.

Cheers.

[rifz]

I've never had it hang maya, it just stops and sits there until you press cancel.

I wish someone who is good with mel would fix up the script a little, so if there's a error you could just press continue.

I also found this in another post, for making swatch by hand.

It's actually very easy but may be slightly time consuming depending on how many shaders you have.

1. Make a sphere (or whatever shape)

2. Apply the shader to the sphere

3. Render it

4. Right click on the rendered image, go to View and choose Grab swatch to Hypershade/Visor.

5. Drag a region around the render

6. Drag the render from that window onto your shader
   node in the Hypershade

It's that easy!