is Rhino search path working on VfR 1.5?

[skysurfer]

As the subject I'm asking if there some improvement in the image search path management.
With V1.05 was impossible to share material between 2 different computer due to the absolute path of textures.

Is The new version taking care about the Rhino search path?

Thanks
Riccardo

[tashko.zashev]

Hi,

This should answer your question,

correct, all external references will be searched for in the folder that the skp file lives in.

[wcmansp]

What Tashko says is true -- VfR does search in the folder the .3dm lives in -- but it's actually better than that. VfR will search the folder of any material in your file that it *can* find whenever there's a material in the file it *can't* find. More simply, for any material you add, VfR adds a search path to that folder and it looks through all these search paths for any material that's missing (for example, if the file or material path has changed from the time it was imported). This allows something useful -- what if you had a folder with a copy of all your materials in it, where all the .vismat, .jpg and .png files were taken out of their individual folders and put in one big folder? What would happen is that if you imported any single material from this folder, even a material you didn't actually use, all of the materials in the folder would now be in the search path for your file. Now when VfR goes to look for a material it wouldn't matter where the material had been imported from initially; as long as its .vismat, .jpg and/or .png components had been added to this folder, and you had imported one material from this folder, VfR will find every material there when it's needed for rendering. You wouldn't use this folder to select materials to import -- you would continue to use the same approach you use now -- but if this folder were on a common shared location it would be easy to standardize so that VfR rendering was essentially free of material path dependencies. We use this for a shared library folder of ~3800 files comprising roughly 1200 materials collected from various .vismat sites, including the Chaos Group site. Operationally, you wouldn't include the "Preview" files in this folder - they're not needed for this; you also couldn't use different materials that had the same name as file names must be unique.

This behavior also works under 1.05 (we've been running both 1.05 and 1.5); it was something Micha originally described in a post quite a while ago and it solved a big problem for us.