If you want to use the Material Library function in Colorway you may want to
create a Material Library and we have a template to use to get the most out of
the Material Libraries in Excel or another spreadsheet application you can
create a spreadsheet and then save it as a CSV file you can keep the main
spreadsheet as an Excel spreadsheet or as a Google sheet or another type of
spreadsheet but in all situations when you're finished and ready to upload it
to Colorway you just need to save it as a CSV file and Colorway will be able to
read that document so I'm going to walk you through what that spreadsheets made
of and what each of those individual columns do inside the spreadsheet there
are some columns which are specific to how materials displayed inside Colorway
and some columns which are just arbitrary and you can change them and
chop them out whenever you want to so the first one is super important and
it's the material ID before ID there's a hash tag and we recommend you not move
this or remove this at all what this does is tell Colorway that
that row inside your spreadsheet is where all of
the headers are going to exist and if you remove that hash tag it will think
it's the first row or if there's no hash tag there it will go on to the next row
down which will be actual content so the first ones the Material ID
number the second one's the category and the third one is the subcategory now
those three columns there are not changeable
if you remove them Colorway won't be able to read your current material library
correctly and then we also have the name which is important for Colorway to read
so you can leave the name blank but we do need that column in there for Colorway
to read beside that you have a bunch of columns which I've just created by
myself that I wanted to appear inside Colorway and they can be whatever you
want and you can have as many or as few of them as you like so I've created one
called the Structure Subcategory the description if I want a longer
description than in the name I have Cost and Currency a Consolidated
Cost so that I can populate Colorway with a single Cost like that I have
different attributes of the materials that I also want to appear in Colorway
the Vendor, the Vendor Country, the Country of Origin, the Composition, some
Special Treatments and then finally I have what I would like Colorway to do in
that material ID so Colorway reads those materials from T0 to T7 and each of
those materials is made up of multiple images T0 is the image on the bottom and
T7 is the image on the top if you only have one image put it on T0 but if you
have multiple start at T0 and move up to T7 if you have images which are
layered over the top of each other and have transparencies and you're trying to
create an artwork effect then it's irrelevant how you layer them up but do
start at T0 and move upwards from there so in my T0 column I've got all of my
JPEG images for all of my materials you can see here that I haven't specified
where I've saved those JPEGs by default if you have the spreadsheet in the same
folder as the JPEGs and you tell Colorway to read from that folder whether
it's a folder on your server whether it's a folder on a web service or a
folder on your own computer if the spreadsheet is inside the folder
with the JPEGs you don't have to specify where it's from and here's the example
so I've got my spreadsheet I have my CSV file which is what colorway is looking
for and then I have all of the JPEGs just saved by their material ID number
but if I want to point to a different folder I have to type out the full
location of that JPEG so I might have to type in the drive and the folder
location or I might have to type in the HTTP location or I might have to type in
my server location but you can set up the spreadsheet to
automatically populate those folders and concatenate that for more advanced users
you can see here that I have T0 and some extra columns next to it which is T0
scale X and T0 scale Y and that's the X and Y scale so X being the horizontal
and Y being the vertical and it's the how I want the image to be scaled so if
I scale one to one the zoom is set on one and it means that my image is going
to come in the actual size but I may want to zoom out and to do that I
increase the value to two and there I'm basically having the scale of the object
because I'm zooming out from the object or from the image I should say so my
image is going to appear smaller and I've done that because I did some tests
and I worked out that when I drag my materials onto the part the best
representation for me is zooming double and getting that scale at 50% so once
you've found the perfect size and you you can apply that to all your materials
or you can do that individually per material that's exactly the same for all
of the other textures that you're going to apply or all of the other images
you're going to apply you could just copy and paste these columns and rename
it T1 or T2 or T3 and enter the values there if you're only ever going to use
one image per material it's best to just leave those blank and not worry about
those extra columns because it does get quite busy once you've created your file
press the Save button to save your original file go to Save as and save it
into the location where all your images are saved as a CSV file press Save
replace it if it already exists press OK and it asks you 'do you want to keep
using that format' and press Yes and then that's it you're done
now when you use Colorway and go to Edit > Preferences you can point your material
library to that folder and it will automatically update whenever that
spreadsheet is updated.