VrayLayeredTexture causes several issues

[BeneZ]

Hi,
I'm a huge fan of the VrayLayered Texture node.
But recently I had several issues.
Not sure if they are just related to a scene, because I didn't realize them before.

Maya crashed sometimes, when I had them in a larger network and with blendmodes (darken/multiply) and tried to set keys.
Especially in animation I had several issues.
They did not show texture preview in the viewport (like Vray material actually does).
In the end I replaced them all with the old Maya LayeredTexture node, which worked robust and showed textures in the viewport.

I got frequently warnings like:
"Error: V-Ray: Error creating thumbnail for image..." (and it was a only simple .png image which worked fine.)
I think these warnings have to do with the node, because they don't show anymore up, after I unplugged all VrayLayeredTextures.

After those crashes*
(*which were just happening so frequently in an extreme usage, when I had 3 VrayLayered-Textures nodes lineds up and used like keyed switches in animation with blendmodes and alphas and then going in a shader, BumpMaterials and then in vray-2sided material. But they were only used to drive the diffuse, no other channel.)
I restored once the document.
Then the node even looked wrong in the attribute editor (that's only UI, but it shows something strange was going on).

Maybe someone knows about reasons for this?

[BeneZ]

Maybe it has to do with the Mask input of that node.

I checked now all files, especially one "warning":
I used an PNG, which was directly exported from a mask of Substance.
And when I checked it in Photoshop it was "indexed color" instead RGB.

When I converted to RGB the warning did not show up again (so far until now).
Maybe it has to do with that...

[yolov]

Can you get us the scene where you had issues in animation / crashes etc ? It could help a lot to debug and fix issues.
As for viewport preview - we'll see if we can do something about this, I'll make a note.
As for 'error creating thumbnail' - that usually happens when vray tries to 'cache' the swatch preview (we make a thumbnail just like maya does) for some reason - but there's more than one possible reasons for that - so a scene could help.

It would also be useful to get the png mask file that didn't work - maybe we can figure a way to print a warning in this case.

[BeneZ]

It now works all fine. It seems it was that PNG from substance, which I used as a mask.
It was "indexed colors" format and I converted it and saved it over (so unfortunately I haven't this png anymore).

The crazy thing is, that when I exported again a mask from substance, it came correctly as RGB out.
So I couldn't reproduce this.
If you think about debugging: There could be a clearer warning message than "Error creating thumbnail" because it wasn't only a thumbnail issue.
The Maya node was able to use the indexed color (which isn't anything importand in my opinion), so it should just report, when it is incomaptible.
Thanks