Xref materials in Max. Do I use them correctly? Some troubles.

[Alex_M]

I've recently started using Xref material in Max for a larger project I'm working on. I want to synchronize the materials across several different scenes so that I save time and have consistency across all of the scenes that use them.

I would like to know if my workflow is correct. I applied each of my materials on a box and then saved the file as materials.max. Then in each of the scenes I loaded the materials through the Xref material. Is this the correct workflow? A thing that puzzled me is why sometimes when I create an Xref material and pick the object I want to get a material from, I get an "Unresolved Xref, File not found" error and the material doesn't show up in the master scene. I found that if I restart Max and then load the scene again the xref material says that it is resolved (loaded correctly). Maybe I'm not doing something right?

[gregvfx]

You can try update Xref under the Xref objects menu. In Max it will resolve the path and remove the error message but it doesn't work well with Vray DR...
I am also very keen on that feature and would like to know if the problem is coming from autodesk or can be solved in Vray.

[WimOos]

I have used this before - worked really well to get the same materials across a lot of files. I had the xref material file on the server so that all machines could access it. DR rendering worked as well. From what I can remember the workflow you describe seems to be similar to what we used. Later on (after we changed our server) we used to get that unresolved Xref, but that was fixed by just changing the path to the new file location. this was in Max2015 on windows8.