Hotspot Tool

The Hotspot Tool

What hotspotting is

Hotspotting is the automatic version of picking a trim. One press gives every part of your selection whichever area of the sheet suits it best, so a whole model can land on a dozen different trims at once.

It uses the same sets as hand-picking.

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Where the controls are

All on the Trim Sheets tab.

• Settings are in [ HOTSPOT TOOLS ].
• The button is Run Hotspot, in the [ SET ] toolbar beside the Trims and Hotspot view toggles.
• The set comes from the SET dropdown in [ LIBRARY ], never the PALETTE swatches.

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Running it

1. Pick your set in [ LIBRARY ]'s SET dropdown.
2. In 3ds Max or Blender, select the object and the faces you want mapped. Select the object but no faces and you get the whole thing.
3. Set Res, Txl, Ang, Sqsh, Mode, Random, Flip and Inset to taste.
4. Press Run Hotspot. Hold Shift, Ctrl or Alt as you press to put every face it touched onto the set's Primary, Secondary or Tertiary material too. A plain press leaves material IDs alone.

A PROCESSING card appears while it works. CANCEL stops it and leaves your mesh as it was.

When it finishes the status strip tells you how it went. Hotspot applied 12 group(s), skipped 0, for instance. If it fails, a report card opens with Copy and Dismiss.

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The settings

Control	Default	Range	What it does
Res	4096	128-8192	The texture resolution everything's sized against. Match it to the sheet you're actually using. Greyed out in Largest Face mode.
Txl	1024	256-16384	How much texture detail you want per unit of surface. Raise it for a tighter, sharper read on small props, lower it to make the texture read larger. Greyed out in Largest Face mode.
Ang	30°	0-180	How sharp an edge has to be before it breaks one patch into two. Lower it when a curved surface comes out as one stretched piece, raise it to keep a large flat panel in one.
Sqsh	25%	0-100	How much stretch is acceptable to make a patch fit. Higher takes more stretch, lower keeps proportions closer to the sheet.
Mode	Target Texel	n/a	Target Texel sizes every patch to hit the Txl figure. Largest Face gives the whole selection one shared texture density instead, and ignores Res and Txl.
Random	On	n/a	Spreads the selection across areas that suit it equally well, rather than taking the same one every time. Off for a repeatable result, on to break visible tiling.
Flip	On	n/a	Mirrors patches at random for extra variety. Only works with Random on. With it off, Flip greys out.
Inset	4 px	0-256	Padding kept around each patch so neighbouring texture doesn't bleed in. Raise it if you see colour creeping in from the next trim.

Ang is separate from the Angle spinner in [ TRIM SETTINGS ] above it, which is for hand-applied trims.

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Steering the result

To do this	Change this
Change what counts as one patch	Ang
Change what size of trim it reaches for	Txl, or Res to match your sheet
Let more of the sheet qualify	Raise Sqsh
Give the whole selection one shared density instead of a fixed detail target	Mode → Largest Face
Stop the same trim repeating everywhere	Leave Random on
Change it more than any setting can	The set itself. The areas you marked on the sheet are what it's got to work with

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The Hotspot view

Switch the [ SET ] toggle from Trims to Hotspot and the tile grid redraws as a mosaic of the areas on the sheet. Click one and that single area is applied to your selection, exactly like clicking a trim.

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When it doesn't come out right

What you see	What it means
No set loaded — load a trim set first.	The SET dropdown's empty, or the set couldn't be found.
Select a poly object first.	Nothing usable was selected in 3ds Max or Blender.
No active set — load a trim set first.	The sheet was found, but it's got no trims marked on it. Open it in the Set Creator and mark them.
No valid face groups	Every selected face was too small to measure. Check for zero-area faces.
Hotspot applied 0 group(s), skipped 6	Nothing suited: the selection was measured, but no area of the sheet would take it.

Anything that couldn't be matched keeps its old UVs, and gets counted in the skipped number.

Fixes

• Nothing matches at all. Check your scene units first. Then raise Sqsh, or change Txl to something the sheet can actually give you.
• Everything lands on the same trim. Check Random is on. If it already is, the sheet may only have one area that suits.
• Stretched on a curved surface. Lower Ang so the curve breaks into several patches instead of being flattened as one.
• Stretched on a long flat run. Lower Sqsh so the distorted result gets refused and something better-proportioned is used.
• A long band came out squished. Lower Sqsh if you'd rather it reached for a different area of the sheet.
• Neighbouring trims bleeding into each other. Raise Inset.