Asset Tracking - missing maps ?

[bernhard]

Hello friends !
Today, I wanted to use the Asseet Tracking tool.

I do have a scene file, with a lot of mssing texture maps.
Unfortenutely I have to render with Backburner Render Farm - and in my case, the render crashes all the time, because of the mising texture maps.

So I was thinking about using the asset tracking tool, to delete all the missing textures.

I was searching for a solution, but I really couldn't figure out, how I can delete the path and the missing texture map, so that it will be automaticly deleted in the material too.

I mean I can strip the path, but I don't know if this alone will cause errors on the render farm.

Is there any way to get rid of all the missing texture maps ?

Thx a lot for every little help,
bernhard

[chris-x//]

Hi,

Have had tons of errors like that with the backburner at work.
If it can help you, if you see a link in the asset tracking tool, there's no way backburner won't "look after it" and crash. The only "secure" solution I've came with is to open your material editor, find every material related to the missing map, open the slot where the map is assigned and set the material to "NONE".

Boring task but should work. I'm sure there are other solutions, like you could create a jpg with name of the missing map, would be sort of a ghost map.

Hope it helps.
chris

[charleyc]

Asset Tracking is not really meant to add or subtract assets. It is more to see where they are and find them if they are missing. There are a few ways to get things rendering in Backburner without errors. If you have the maps, re-path the missing files with Asset Tracker and things will work fine. If you don't have the maps, you can do a number of things. One is what was mentioned above. Locate the missing maps in the Mat Editor and remove them. Another way is to simply strip the materials off all the objects you know could be effected and re-texture as needed. Or, recreate the missing maps. Finally, if you know how, you could create a script to find and remove the missing maps.

If you don't need the maps, then I am not sure that you need the specific materials containing those maps. I think the quickest solution would be to re-texture. If you choose to try and locate each map, a big help with that is to use the Get Material window, use Scene as the Browse From selection and change the display to show thumbnails. Any missing bitmap will show as a black thumbnail.

[dlparisi]

THere's a script on scriptspot that collects all materials with missing maps and places them in the mat editor (just search for missing maps)... Not sure if it works with vray materials though.

[MoonDoggie]

fn existFile fname = (getfiles fname).count != 0

missingBmaps = getClassInstances BitmapTexture

for m in missingBmaps do (
     if (isProperty m #filename) then (  -- checks if the bitmap has the property "filename"
          if not(existFile m.fileName) then (     -- checks to see if the bitmap file exists...
               format "File: % is missing!\n" m.filename
               m.filename = ""   -- changes the path of the bitmap to nothing
          )
     )
)

Haven't tested it, but this should get you started. GetClassInstances() will help because bitmaps don't just have to be in materials, they can also be in slots on displacement maps on modifier stacks etc.

Problems: The thing is changing just the filename will change all instances of that file which max and your renderer should just ignore anyway.

If you want to strip the bitmap out of the slot in the material and leave it a blank color or whatever, the code will be completely different. GetClassInstances() will not allow you alone to figure out what materials each of the missing bitmaps are assigned to, instead you'll have to loop through the entirety of the scene materials and check if a missing bitmap is assigned to it in it's diffuseMap/opacityMap/reflectionMap/ etc slot. and strip it from the actual material.

after reading above a good suggestion might be to run the script but change m.filename = "" to something like m.filename = "C:/BrightGreenColor.jpg" -- where you'd put a jpg file that is colored bright green and check if it renders correctly in BB.

Hope this helps,
-Colin

[bernhard]

huii...

indeed, a lot of work to get rid of all the missing maps....
well, thx for all your suggestions, everything was a help.

I think in my case, the best I can do is search for all the missing bitmaps, select these in the material slots they were used and delete it....

a lot of work, but now I will take more attention to all the bitmaps...
thx a lot,
bernhard