Grouping Tool: Assign Material

This is the tool that I use most often. It allows you to change the material of the current group, either by creating a new material or picking one that already exists. Used with some imagination this can massively extend the usefulness of just about every model in your collection.

The Assign Material button allows you to either create new materials or assign an existing material to a group. If you are working on a figure then that existing material can come from any part of the figure, not just the current body part. Thus if you want to create a new 'cuff' material for a a top, you can create that material on the first cuff, and then assign the newly created material to the other cuff.

Fig 1: A new polygon group

Step one is to select a polygon group. This can be a new group that you have created, or an existing group already in place. Some clothing items have nice neat joints between the body parts, allowing you to simply use the built in grouping. A good example of this is Jessi's Polo shirt (Poser 6). Both the Abdomen and Hip have been created with neat straight borders, allowing you to assign new materials to the existing groups.

Once you have the correct group selected (lit up in red), click on Assign Material. You can now either type a name into the box (Poser 5 and 6), or select an existing material from the drop down box provided (Poser 6). If you pick a new name, that material will be automatically created and give a random colour.

When you close the grouping tool, you will see your new material, ready to modify in the material room.

Fig 2: A new material zone

Suggested Uses

Realistically, the uses of this tool are only limited by your imagination (and the underlying design of the model you are working with).

Given the right polygons, you can use new materials to create new material zones on figures (creating a 'lips' material in Jessi for instance!).

Used on cloths you can use new material groups to alter the overall shape of an item, by creating materials to turn invisible.

Displacement can be used to create layered effects where none exist.

As show in Figure 2, material zones can be used to add more details to a model.

Simple props can be made more useful by adding extra materials - assign a separate material to one face of the basic cube to give it a front or top for instance.