cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Community Tip - Have a PTC product question you need answered fast? Chances are someone has asked it before. Learn about the community search. X

DMT appearance/color space definition

dunawapj
4-Participant

DMT appearance/color space definition

I am using Creo Parametric - Release 8.0 (connected) Release 8.0 and Datecode8.0.4.0


Hello, I need to make some custom color palettes for our organization. I haven't been able to find a detailed rundown of the structure of dmt files, and would like some help determining the meaning of each variable.

I have seen opened some files and have seen:
ambient_color - with 4 values scaled from 0 to 1
diffuse_color - same values as ambient
specular_color - same values as ambient
(Perhaps three of these values are scaled RGB, but I am not sure how to utilize these three sets of color definition.)

diffuse - value 0-1
ambient - value 0-1
shine -value 0-1
intensity - value 0-1
reflection - value 0-1
transparents - value 0-1
index_of_refraction - value 0-?

I believe some of the second group are tied to parameters than can be edited in the appearance manager, but the scaling is different and I don't think it has all of the listed variables as options.

Any information or guides you can offer on creation of a custom dmt file would be appreciated - I know the RGB values of the colors I need and would just like to figure out how these files work.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

In the past I've tried to manually edit the appearance.dmt file to put some custom appearances in, with some limited success, but I've found that I'm generally better off defining new appearances with the appearance manager in Creo itself.

 

Some of the entries in the files are somewhat odd. For example, they are using RGBA values, but it is not apparent to me that the "A" or "alpha" channel is used - there's a "transparency"  value that determines how opaque an object using the appearance will be.

 

The colors are all scaled values, from zero to 1 as you mentioned. This is kind of annoying if you're trying to hand edit because most of the tools I have seen tend to specify color components as values from zero to 255 (including Creo's own appearance manager).

 

When I look at my appearance.dmt file, it seems the ambient and diffuse colors are always the same. I think I tried messing about with them and found it didn't really make a difference? The specular values are what you see when you're getting a bit of a "shine" on the part, like the "highlight" spot on a shaded sphere.

 

The thing I learned is to be careful naming my colors. I adopted a convention like "clear-grey-light", "clear-grey-dark" and such so the colors are sorted with clear appearances grouped together, etc.

View solution in original post

2 REPLIES 2

In the past I've tried to manually edit the appearance.dmt file to put some custom appearances in, with some limited success, but I've found that I'm generally better off defining new appearances with the appearance manager in Creo itself.

 

Some of the entries in the files are somewhat odd. For example, they are using RGBA values, but it is not apparent to me that the "A" or "alpha" channel is used - there's a "transparency"  value that determines how opaque an object using the appearance will be.

 

The colors are all scaled values, from zero to 1 as you mentioned. This is kind of annoying if you're trying to hand edit because most of the tools I have seen tend to specify color components as values from zero to 255 (including Creo's own appearance manager).

 

When I look at my appearance.dmt file, it seems the ambient and diffuse colors are always the same. I think I tried messing about with them and found it didn't really make a difference? The specular values are what you see when you're getting a bit of a "shine" on the part, like the "highlight" spot on a shaded sphere.

 

The thing I learned is to be careful naming my colors. I adopted a convention like "clear-grey-light", "clear-grey-dark" and such so the colors are sorted with clear appearances grouped together, etc.

dunawapj
4-Participant
(To:KenFarley)

Thanks for the help! I've played around in the appearance manager and I think you're right, that that is the way to do it. In the process I've figured out how to edit the dmt file in parallel to speed things up. It seems that the values do align with the parameters I listed, but have different names (example: intensity = highlight). I am a bit surprised there isn't more information readily available on this but reverse engineering it has worked OK.

 

For now I'm just making my diffuse and specular colors the same as the ambient as you said - not sure on their intended purpose.

 

 

Top Tags