Learn how to get started with InstaMAT’s powerful scene nodes, which allow you to export complex 3D assets with multiple meshes and materials. This introduction covers creating a scene, adding meshes, applying textures, and exporting files from InstaMAT Studio with embedded textures.
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I’m new to all of this, and here is my situation. I have a single mesh with 19 material slots. I created the materials in InstaMAT (excellent tool, btw) and I was looking for a way to combine the 19 into one. I first tried Mesh Merge in InstaLOD (another excellent tool), but it rearranged the layout and was then incompatible with my original .fbx UV map. I came across this video and thought this must be the way to go. It is super useful and thank you, but I am still stuck with the 19 materials. The video shows how to handle a single material, but I am unsure where to go from there. I can change the selected material and see it rendered in the preview, but what do I need to do to all of them at once? Thanks again for wonderful tools and helpful videos!
Hello @smadey and welcome to our community!
It’s great to hear you are enjoying InstaMAT and InstaLOD! Thanks for mentioning! 
In order to combine material sections “aka texture sets or also materials” together, the texture maps need to be re-created and repacked so that the material information fits onto one or a few UV tiles. This is what Material Merging in InstaLOD is doing, along with adjusting the mesh’s UV map as you mentioned so that the meshes know where their texture information is on the tile.
Could you provide a little more information on the scenario regarding the incompatibility with your original .fbx UV map? The original FBX will have its UVs in a way that expects 19 separate UV tiles, each with their own set of PBR textures for color/roughness/metalness, etc.
Regarding the scene nodes in this video, scene nodes allow you to build scenes containing multiple meshes and materials. You can craft an entire scene and export it as a self-contained file, with textures embedded directly inside as long as the output format supports it like FBX or USD. This makes the files more portable since they don’t need to reference specific textures stored on disk. By creating multiple materials using scene nodes, you’re able to create those material sections for the scene.
Thanks!
Hi, thanks for the quick reply. Here is what I mean by “incompatible” … I created the mesh and its material slots in Blender (UV unwrapped, etc and exported the .fbx). I then ran the Material Merge in InstaLOD to get a single color, metalness, roughness, and normal map respectively. After that, I reimported the fbx into Blender and created a single material using the 4 merged images mentioned above. This is where I don’t see the images lining up to the UVs since the fbx is still using the original UV map. I’m wondering if there is a way to also export the .fbx after the merge process so everything lines up. Am I doing something incorrectly? Is there a process within InstaMAT/InstaLOD that would better suit this scenario? Thanks!
Hi @smadey,
Thanks for the clarification! InstaLOD is altering the original FBX’s UVs so that it knows how to correctly reference the new textures, so you’ll need to export a new FBX out of InstaLOD and import the new one into Blender in order to see the textures correctly match up.
You can do this by going to File > Export Scene from the main menu.
I also wanted to mention that InstaLOD “as well as InstaMAT” has an integration for Blender. As an alternative workflow, you could use InstaLOD within Blender to perform actions like UV unwrapping, remeshing, and material merging. Note that if you’re doing a material merge within Blender with the integration, it works best if the meshes are using baked out texture maps like the ones you get from InstaMAT. Some of Blender’s specific material shaders might not transfer easily with material merging.
Feel free to let us know if you have any questions!
Thanks!
Ahhhh!! Export Scene. That’s EXACTLY what I was searching for! As I mentioned above, I am new to this and am still getting used to the terminology. I am just a hobbyist and would like to say a huge thank you to you and your team for providing such excellent tools to people like me (pioneer license), and also such excellent customer service. Keep up the good work! I am looking forward to discovering more of what I can do with your tools!
I’m glad we could help! Thanks very much for the kind words! I’ll be sure to pass them along to the team.
Thanks again!