"VrayXRef"?

[Art48]

Is there something like that?
I dont mean proxy, I mean a alternative to 3ds max' XRef system. It works 90% of the time but eventually something breaks, and its so annyoing.
We are on a thight deadline and suddenly XRef materials swap around for no reason (source file is fine) and its just messy.

Is there ANY way around the XRef System in 3ds max apart from containers (which I heard also suffer bugs and are not 100% production ready)? Hell I would even buy a seperate Chaosgroup product if you guys do something like that...

[joconnell]

Thinkbox xmesh is quite good for that. It's baking to caches so it means things like controllers and modifiers aren't accessible but you can link a lot of assets together, add on modifiers on top of xmesh caches loaded in and what materials easily enough. A lot of places use it for big vfx gigs, and by nature of it collapsing max scenes down to simpler files using just mesh, vertex animations and transforms, there's less to go wrong with it.

[vlado]

I don't know if XMesh is quite the same thing - does it keep materials on the objects?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Art48]

The Thing is also I would need it to keep helper/null objects also.

[joconnell]

Yeah - the cache file itself stores model data with other files per frame adding in transform data, I think it writes out your material data to other files which the loader recreates as a giant multi subobject material afterwards.

Xrefs have gotten some love in the newer version of max due out - there was some stuff demoed at end user event last year showing more flexibility in linked files and hopefully that'll make it in to 2016 due this april.

[Art48]

So much for the "discontinued feature". ANd then pay some more thousand euros for the sole purpose of having a working software in which then other stuff breaks. Story of Autodesk. I'll show myself out.

[joconnell]

Yeah it's annoying that they start something, never really finish it and then come up with a new approach and never finish that either. After a while there's all these incomplete functions adding up, and it's impossible to remove them as it'd break a lot of people's older files.

[Dave_Wortley]

I'm pushing Autodesk hard to improve XRef Scene's so they can be used as containers, in a much more efficient and logical way. I've made demo versions... prototypes, so we'll just have to see what happens now... whether they'll listen or not...

[theedge]

I'm pushing Autodesk hard to improve XRef Scene's so they can be used as containers, in a much more efficient and logical way. I've made demo versions... prototypes, so we'll just have to see what happens now... whether they'll listen or not...

Very interesting !
That's definitely something that has to be implemented on autodesk side.