help! import material from another mx file bringing in lights and geometry i cant delete

[super gnu]

ive updated a material in a scene. now i need to update in other scenes so they match.

when i bring the material in using the material editor (opening the max file as a material library) i get a duplicate of the sun and the geometry its linked to merged in too..

if i delete that sun or the geometry, it deletes my current sun as well. if i then undo the delete, the rogue sun is invisible in the viewport, but selectable.

if i turn off the new sun, my old one turns off as well... its totally screwed my scene.

i redid the import from scratch, (plus a load of other changes i made) first renaming the sun etc in the source scene so i could tell what was what. keeping an eye for stuff being imported.. this time it seemed ok... i did a render, all ok..

then i opened material editor to tweak a different material, set another render off, and BOOM the duplicate sun is present again.

the materials i was importing dont have direct links to the stuff its bringing in (i.e. they do not have references to the sun in the maps) however the linkages in the scene are pretty complex, i believe the imported material is on an object that is linked to another object which contains a different material with a map that references to the sun....

help?

[fixeighted]

To be honest I didn't know that one could even do that...open a .max file as a library I mean, so that's interesting.
Anyway, could you not just save any materials you need to a new library for the subsequent updates, or am I missing something?

[super gnu]

iirc ive had this problem before even when using standard material libraries, although i may remember wrong, since i cant see how a material library could even have geometry in it. . usually im merging a material from one max scene to another (when it works) so the material library seems an unecessary extra step. anyway i got round the issue by importing the materials into an empty max scene and assigning to a couple of spheres.. this imported a few bits of rogue geometry and lights from the source scene, as was happening before, but then i deleted it all and saved a clean scene containing just the materials.

this then worked fine.

i guess i should retry with material libraries..

[fixeighted]

Well yeah, tbh that is how I normally do it, i.e. in my master scene I just apply what I think I'll need to a few primitives and save selected just those, then delete them.
That way as you say, you don't bother with libraries.

[OPEN_RANGE]

Hey I think this has just happened to me, at least twice. Maybe this is a bug that needs to be brought to the attention of those who could fix it?

Working in one scene I used the material editor to open the materials from the .max file of a different scene in a different project folder. I wanted to use some of those materials in the new scene/project.

Suddenly I have two identical vray sun and sun targets. Screws up the lighting in the scene. If I delete one they both get deleted. In my case no geometry linked to the vray sun, so I get the duplicate sun and target but no duplicate geometry.

My fix was to delete both suns and then merge a single sun from an earlier iteration scene file.

There are other cases of vray sun getting mysteriously duplicated that I have read about in the forum here. I think those cases involve merging geometry from another scene and then getting an unwanted second vray sun.

Anyone from Chaos reading this?

[Joelaff]

I had Thread about this recently. For me it happens when you load a Max file as a scene library, and keeps happening until you remove/close that library which is actually a Max file.

Instead I create a new empty Matlib and store the materials there. Then I load (or reload) the matlib in the other scene to get the materials.

When using plain matlibs this seems to work well.

I have also done the apply material to simple objects, save selected, and merge. That works too.

Very annoying bug— been there for years. I just recently figured out it was the max files being used as libraries.

[OPEN_RANGE]

Thanks for your comments. Annoying indeed. I will be esp careful about opening a .max via the material editor.

I think, but can’t swear to it, that the double sun comes in when merging geometry from another max scene as well.

[Joelaff]

Thanks for your comments. Annoying indeed. I will be esp careful about opening a .max via the material editor.

I think, but can’t swear to it, that the double sun comes in when merging geometry from another max scene as well.

It very well may. For a few months I kept getting double suns. Do deal with it I would disable the bad one (didn't delete).

After I figured out what I thought was the cause I removed the Max file form the open matlibs, and it seemed to go away. Am I 100% certain this is the cause? No, maybe 90%. And there could be more than one cause... Who knows.

[Vizioen]

Just to chime in, I also have the tendency to load in materials from other max files through the material editor (open max file instead of mat). And for some reason the VraySun is always imported with it, sometimes all the suns if there's multiple. These suns have nothing to do with the materials. They aren't linked in any way. So I think this is a bug. This has been happening for quite a while now.

Anyone from Chaos care to explain why?

[Vizioen]

So I've been thread digging and this is apparently a 3ds Max bug, or maybe this is another thing? https://forums.chaos.com/forum/v-ray...material-merge