Can't get rid of Missing External Files

[3ddesign]

I got no response at the Viz forum so thought I'd try my luck here.

I have 10 pieces of standard furniture I use over and over. I want to clean up the model and get rid of all the materials and maps on the furniture. I've assigned one plane jane Vray material to all pieces but still get a ton of Missing External Files on file load. I tried the UVW Remove and Bitmap/Photometric Paths utilities w/o success. I've looked in the Material / Map Browser, with Browse From selected to Scene and Selected and see no materials, yet when I open the file in Mtl Library, there are a bunch of materials with maps still there. I'm going crazy trying fix this. I've tried save selected w/o success. I tried exporting as 3ds but the geometry gets messed up. Please help!

Craig

[percydaman]

tried merging the geometry with the plain jane mat into a new max file?

[3ddesign]

Yes, and the resulting new file contains the old materials and maps.

[dennis]

copy and paste this in to the maxlistner and press enter and it should set all the materials in the material editor to a standard material. You still ned to be sure that all the scene materials are standard ( or compatible ).

for m = 1 to meditmaterials.count do meditmaterials[m] = standard()

[3ddesign]

Dennis,

Thanks for the reply. I tried the script but still get the list of missing externals. I made sure that all scene objects were assigned a standard material. Any other suggestions anyone? This has really got me buggered.

Craig

[dennis]

what externals are missing ? could it be non material related perhaps.

clean the materialeditor, can be done with the little 'script'
assign only compatible/standard materials to _all_ scene objects
clean out any environment assignments
modifiers can also carry maps (displacement )

the material browser with 'scene' checked, all in 'show' checked and 'root only' unchecked should give you the whole thing.

[3ddesign]

It finally worked! I tried merging the objects from the original scene but the maps all came over. I tried running your script on the original scene but the maps remained. But I merged the file where the script was run and all is well. Thanks all for your help on this.

On a side note: This is one of the best forums I've ever associated with. The members are all very decent, mature and helpful people. I've been visiting another renderer forum lately and have been unimpressed with the personalities that dominate it. I think this reflects on the personalities of the developers. I've met Vlado and David and they are very genuine and decent guys. Thanks to all who continue to make Vray a great program.

[Da_elf]

yeah. then you get immature people like me hehe. good to hear you got your problem fixed and welcome to the forum. thought id point out an equally usefull place. www.vray.info alot of forum information ends up stored there