Externally sourced Shader...

[Dave_Wortley]

This would be a really really cool feature to have....

One of the pitfalls of max in it's current architecture it's a pain to have a shader linked between max scenes. You can Xref object the shader in but it's a pain to do, prone to problems and causes unneeded overhead.


We would need a button in the material editor, perhaps an extra rollout on the bottom of each material which allows you to save this shader (and submats) to a file.

Then we would need a new type of Vray Mtl which was Called.....

VrayExternalShader or something...

Where you could source it to the external file. So multiple scene could use the same shader setup so you could overwrite this file and suddenly in all your scenes the material has been updated.

Then to make it even better you could have the option to have the VrayExternalShader material embedded the sourced shader within it so you could make changes to the shader and it would automatically write this to the file so you wouldn't even have to think about updating it.

If I knew C++/SDK I'd be writing this now...

Another advantage is that you'd then have backwards compatibility for vray shaders between max versions.

[vlado]

We can do it if we export the shaders to V-Ray Standalone shaders (the ones that we use for V-Ray RT). This will mean limited support for 3rd party maps and materials - not sure how important this will be.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Dave_Wortley]

mmm I think we would still need the support for 3rd maps and materials.

Is there not a way to basically wire-parameter the values for a VrayMtl to a file internally. I think it would have to be internal to Vray so it would work with Xrefs object, Xref Scenes, and containers, otherwise I could write some maxscript to update the materials pre-render., but this wouldn't really work with xrefs.

The more I think about it the more I can see why you're saying no third party support... but what about standard max submaterials? And would there be a way to open the architecture to allow people to develope that support for the 3rd party shaders export?

I don't know what it's like from an SDK side but from a maxscript side it's a pain that you can't just get a numerical list for all the properties of every material, then you could read/write these pretty easily. Max was never built to be easy hey?

[im.thatoneguy]

Isn't this what the XRef_Mat is for?

[Dave_Wortley]

Isn't this what the XRef_Mat is for?

Yes that's what they're supposed to be for but there are stupid things like to Xref in a material you've got a dependant extra scene and you've got to pick the object and material manually if you try set up xref_mats manually.

For instance, Try Xreffing in an object from one file and a material from another, do this on a few objects and it becomes cluttered in the xref menu. Add on top of that you can't script xref_mat properly.

[Donald2B]

Typically what we do is create a couple of files.

Create a Master File, it basically just contains lights and Cameras, maybe some background stuff.
Create a Master Material XRef File
Create XRefs for Bldgs, Site, etc and assign materials from the Master Material XRef File.

It works much better for use this way than to start XRefing objects from multiple files, like you said, it just gets to be a HUGE mess.