Referencing a material in multiple scenes

[Wayne Harney]

The ability to export a material to an external file and reference it in multiple scenes would be soooo nice right now. Vraymtrlproxy? I'd like to edit a material once and have it update across all my scenes that use it.

[vlado]

Hm, wouldn't this work even now (like exporting a scene with just a material)? I'm not sure how Maya's references work, so this may not be possible... but in any case, we are working on a solution for this.

Best regards,
Vlado

[trixian]

We already have the native xref material, but since max's xref object system (the shader is handled though this system) is completely bonkers, you easily end up with strange dependancy loops that should not exist, and scenes not loading shaders correctly.
Could it be something similar to this that bypasses the max native xref handling maybe?

[vlado]

Well, we are working on supporting .vismat files, which are kind of V-Ray proxy files, but for materials...

Best regards,
Vlado

[Dave_Wortley]

Well, we are working on supporting .vismat files, which are kind of V-Ray proxy files, but for materials...

Best regards,
Vlado

Like! Will these be able to cope with various material map plugins like bercon etc?

[vlado]

Like! Will these be able to cope with various material map plugins like bercon etc?

Since they are designed to be portable, the answer would be no; however the Bercon maps in particular could be made to work when we finish our port to V-Ray RT for them...

Best regards,
Vlado

[Wayne Harney]

This sounds awesome! Importing and exporting materials is a piece of cake but constantly updating several scenes that use the same materials specs (ie. subdivisions) adds up to a lot of valuable time and human error. I like to have my eggs in one basket when possible.

[Morbid Angel]

I'm not sure how Maya's references work

In fact, maya's reference is one of the best I have ever worked with. We publish material libraries and reference them into other scenes where we assign those materials with scripts, and then simply version up materials and update them in shots, which creates a pretty fail proof system.