I started this page because I am beginning to put together a material library for use on transportation design visualizations, because the MicroStation online help and this community currently lack a guide to setting up your production environment with regard to matierial libraries, and because others, too, have indicated a desire for such guidelines. Progress on this page will surely be slow at times.
The eventual goal of this page is to present successful strategies for managing a library of rendering materials for Luxology rendering within MicroStation. I encourage you to edit this page to share your expertise with the community.
Two relevant threads:
textures maps and memory management - started Sep 20 2011
I hope you have revisited MATs and PALs for SS3 - started Sep 8 2011
| Cfg Var Name | Long Description | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| MS_LOCAL_MATERIALS | If set to 1, rendering materials and their associated assignment tables are copied into the design file rather than using external files. Local material support is new in MicroStation V8i (SELECTseries 3) and is not supported by earlier versions (MS_LOCAL_MATERIALS). | |
| MS_MTBL | Search path(s) for material tables. (MS_MTBL) | |
| MS_MATERIAL | Search path(s) for material palettes. (MS_MATERIAL) | |
| MS_PATTERN | Search path(s) for pattern maps. (MS_PATTERN) | |
| MS_BUMP | Search path(s) for bump maps. (MS_BUMP) | |
| MS_IMAGE | Search path(s) for images. (MS_IMAGE) | |
| MS_IMAGEOUT | Directory where created images will be stored. (MS_IMAGEOUT) | |
| MS_SHADOWMAP | Directory where shadow maps will be read from and written to. (MS_SHADOWMAP) | |
| MS_LIGHTING | Directory where IES lighting data will be read from. (MS_LIGHTING) | |
| MS_LIGHTLIST | List of design files containing light sources to be used as templates when placing lights. All lights found in these files can be selected from the drop-down next to the light name in the Define Light tool. (MS_LIGHTLIST) | |
| MS_RENDERLOG | File name for recording rendering statistics. (MS_RENDERLOG) | |
| MS_PTDIR | Working directory for temporary Particle Tracing files. (MS_PTDIR) | |
| MS_SHARED_DR_DIR | Working directory for shared rendering files, including Particle Tracing and Radiosity files. (MS_SHARED_DR_DIR) | |
| MS_IMAGE_EDITOR | Default program to be used to edit an image file. This program is activated by double-clicking in the preview area of the Map Editor dialog. (MS_IMAGE_EDITOR) | |
| MS_MATERIAL_PREVIEW_BACKGROUND | Image to be used for the background of material previews in the Material Editor. (MS_MATERIAL_PREVIEW_BACKGROUND) | |
| MS_FILTEREDCODECS | Codecs that should not be shown in the list of available AVI codecs when exporting a movie from animator. (MS_FILTEREDCODECS) | |
| MS_RENDERV7MATERIALS | If set to 1, materials are rendered as they were in V7. Most affected are translucency, transparency, specularity, and diffuse as applied to pattern maps. (MS_RENDERV7MATERIALS) | |
| MS_DISABLE_RPCBROWSER | If set to 1, the RPC Thumbnail Browser will be disabled. (MS_DISABLE_RPCBROWSER) | |
| MS_RPCDIR | Directory to search for rpc files. (MS_RPCDIR) |