Texture light parameters changing on frame change

[chromaloma]

Hi!

When using live link from 3ds max 22, I have issues with that the texture light is changing both its texture and rotation parameters when i change frame number in 3ds max. Seems random when it's bugging and not.
Is this something that is reported from elsewhere and with a solution?

I had two max files open the last time it happened. (With only one live-linking) Maybe it is affecting?
Anyway, it's a real problem, because I can't render with the sky texture I have planned with from 3ds max.

[chromaloma]

Update: Working now with one max instance running. But I do recall rendering while having two instances open yesterday, without any problem.
Edit 2: Render crashed due to memory issues after a couple of hundred frames, and then after restart of Vantage/Max it changes the texture light again. Only one Max instance running now.

[vladimir.nedev]

By "texture light" I guess you mean the environment image ?

The number of 3dsMax instances doesn't matter, if only one of them is running a live link.

If you change the environment image in Vantage, then change the current frame in 3ds Max, I guess Vantage receives a message about the environment changing,
so the one from 3ds Max gets loaded back.
The solution for now is to use only 3ds Max to specify your environment when in a live link.

We could add an option to disable environment updates through the live link, but there might be UX issues with this too.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[chromaloma]

Yes, the environment image. I am troubleshooting my scene right now. According to the Vantage log, it seems like it's loading two active dome lights. 15:13:55.331 [inf] 2 enabled dome lights found in the scene. Using 'Day 026 lightsource_001@light_309341' as environment.
And this is the wrong light. Seems like it might be randomly choosing between these two lights on start linking. I find it strange that this second dome with the wrong light is nowhere to be found, though. I have only one dome light in my max-scene, and all its xrefs have lights ignored.

[vladimir.nedev]

If both dome lights are enabled and have intensity>0, yes Vantage will pretty much choose randomly between the two (depends on the order they were exported to the in-memory vrscene).
That's because Vantage supports only a single environment/dome light.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[chromaloma]

Makes sense. Looks like I solved my problem here. I did actually have one active dome in one of the xref files, in addition to the one in the master file. Why that light still loaded in max even if the "ignore lights" was on, is another case. In the future, it would be nice somehow to be able to get a warning or something if the transferred scene has two or more active dome lights, other than in the debug log. Thanks and merry christmas!

[vladimir.nedev]

Merry Christmas !