Export atom properties (charges, etc.) as a weight map

[Afdeling]

Hi everyone!

So I coloured a surface with hydrophobicity and exported it to .obj. What happens is that this surface is exported with thousands of materials, one per color value. Most 3d applications have issues opening this file with these many materials.
I tried opening this in blender and other apps and it just crashed.
What needs to be done is for this surface to be exported with just one material and these color values exported as a weight map. Obj supports this and in a 3d app (blender, lightwave, houdini) we can use this weight map to drive properties, such as the color that we can feed into the single material.
Thanks!
Luis

[Admin]

Hi Luis, thanks for your feedback! Would you have an example of a file with such weigts, so we can make sure the format works for you? Also, maybe another solution that would work would be to do UV unwrapping and export a texture and UV coordinates. Would that work for you?

[Afdeling]

Hi Thank you for answering.
One thing that I checked and it seems that it doesn't work would be to save these weight maps in .obj, it seems that the format doesn't support it. I am not sure about this though.
It would be great if you could support a more complete format, also since you can do animation now, a format like fbx or alembic would be a lot better, and these formats support a lot more features.
https://prnt.sc/1udx69p
This image shows a sphere with two different weight maps. With these weight maps we can control colours or other effects like displacements or instancing other objects using the weight maps as masks.
I will share here a zip file with two fbx files inside, one in binary and the other one in ascii.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gWAoHpJJ7wD7-vTiDoGzUwOPaYkRGKHy/view?usp=sharing

I'll leave here also a link that can be useful of other apps (CHAP) that are using obj to export calculated values as weight maps (hydrophobicity, charges, etc.)
https://www.channotation.org/docs/contents_objmtl_file/

Another thing that you should also consider (to improve the interchange of assets/animation etc. between Samson and a 3d app such as Houdini) would be the implementation of USD, most 3d apps are moving to this universal file format
https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html

Again, thank you for your interest.
Best,
Luis

[Admin]

Hi Luis, sorry for the delay! Could you please contact us at contact@samson-connect.net? It would be easier to chat / zoom about this so we can focus the development.
Thanks!
best,

Stephane