loading bitmaps (missing textures) at every frame

[tangelder]

Hi,

I have a question concerning the rendering of an animation and the loading of bitmaps before rendering every frame.

In the scene we are rendering we have a few materials with bitmaps that are misssing. For the image it does not really matter because we will not be seeing these bitmaps. And because we do not have these bitmaps we also can not update the paths to the correct bitmap.

The problem we have with rendering these materials with missing bitmaps is that before rendering every frame of the animation, max searches for these missing bitmaps before rendering the frame. This takes a few seconds that we would gladdly get rid of.

I was wondering if it would be possible to discard this search for mssing bitmaps with some setting?
I know that i can also remove the missing bitmaps from the materials, but i was wondering if there was also maybe some override that can tell max to not serach for these missing textures?

Best regards,

Joost

[Morbid Angel]

I think it has to check for bitmap no matter what. One thing we used to do is if we had a few missing we would create a black image of small size and name it as those bitmaps would be named. Unless you have a lot of them named different it would be difficult. Best thing is to cleanup imo.

[tangelder]

Hi Dmitry,

Thanks for the reply.
I guess cleaning is indeed the simplest way. Normally its just a few maps that need to be cleaned anyway.