Xref Materials - Noise maps - Vray Dirt

[martindrake81]

Has anybody had any issues with xref materials

I have a scene with lots of houses xrefed in. The houses all have xref materials in too. The problem is the noise maps on the xrefs materials and also vray dirt (I think) have scale issues or flicker on and off on some of the render farm. It is not really certain render nodes, but just a bit random.

We have solved the problem before by removing the xref materials, but this kind of defeats the point of using them!

Any solutions?

Cheers M

[martindrake81]

Ok this post has obviously not struck any chords.

However it is worth mentioning that if you merge the xref materials in the scene, duplicate materials of the same material can end up with different dimensions in the vray dirt map. e.g 500mm and 50000mm.

Strange!

However a max problem rather than a vray one I think.

[jonahhawk]

We sometimes have problems with maps being "off" in some frames from some of the machines on the farm. Even when not using Xrefs. This typically happens on large scenes with many objects and I suspected it was an issue with ram on some of our older machines. but there is no decernable pattern in the BB render log. i.e. I don't see the same servers dropping maps every time. I wish Xref worked more like VRay Proxies. They seem much more reliable.

[martindrake81]

maps, duplicate materials .........

Yeah we have had problems with maps too. I'm not sure its ram though as because you normally get backburners errors, if this is the case.

We try and keep all or maps well organised now, making sure everything is correctly mapped and resolved to unc within asset tracker. I think if you get in the habit of doing this you should get far less problems.

Unfortnuately this doesn't work for Vray proxies or HDRI's.


I'm cheesed off with these xref materials though, you spend ages carefully setting them up neatly and then they don't bloody work! So then you merge them in the scene and end up with loads of duplicate materials, that are a real pain to get rid off!

Anybody know how to get rid of duplicate materials. Blur has a script but it doesn't work with multi subs.