hardware texture display, vray materials won't display textures.

[jbuttell]

I'm trying to get vray materials to display textures, but they fail to for some reason. If I use a stock lambert shader with a texture, it displays in the viewport, but none of the vray ones do. Is this a current limitation or am I doing something wrong?

thanks!

[vladimir.nedev]

Can you check the "hardware texturing" roll-out in the attribute editor of the VRayMtl ? May be something went wrong and the texture channel was set to "None". Do you have any errors in the script editor concerning the VRay materials ?

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[timdog]

Hi! What about the texture resolution in viewport? If I choose maximum resolution in the vray material its limited to 256x256. But I need alot more during the Uvmapping/texturing process. If I choose default its often more/satisfying but not always. It seems like its somewhat random. Anyone got a grip on this ?

[snivlem]

Set your maximum texture limit in Maya Prefs.

Then in your material rollout leave it set to default and the texture resolution will be whatever you set in Maya Prefs under General Display Preferences

[timdog]

Hi! Thanks for the reply. Im aware of the global texture resolution setting but for some reason this doesnt always work. Sometimes maya refuses to display the highres version though I didnt identify when.

[jensl]

I usually set the texture resolution to 'highest' in the hardware texturing rollout, then expand the extra attributes rollout, where you can access the resolution limit manually, and push it up from 256 to whatever value.

Jens

[jbuttell]

Vladimir,

It shows 'none' as you suggested, though I think at some point i may have seen other options there. Then again, maybe what I'm remembering were the options listed under the Vray Blend, where it shows each channel. Selecting the right channel there didn't work either. I don't see any script errors, but I'll keep an eye out. The fact that I have only one choice (none) seems like something is broken. What I have determined since I first posted this though, is that the texture does seem to be there, it's just displaying at 32x32 res. So low, I couldn't easily tell what was going on. Unlike the vrayBlend, there's only a single Hardware Texturing option, the channel selector. I have no way of specifying texture resolution here.

With that said, I was able to get the vrayBlend to display textures just now - I was misunderstanding how it functions, admittedly I still don't fully understand it. The texture I want to display at the moment is the blendAmount texture. The vrayBlend dialog doesn't provide the means to select the blendAmount maps, forcing me to add the texture-node to one of the material slots to preview it ;/ Is there any way we can get the blend amounts to be options in the texture channel list? While I'm on the topic of vrayBlend and textures, when you use the combined textures, how many and what textures does vray choose? I can't imagine it goes through every channel of every material and combines them on the fly.


timdog, I just found out that by setting to 'default' (rather than using the rather odd max of 256x256) it uses the system preference. I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around it too, but.... that seemed to work.


jens, thanks for the tip. I can't seem to find the extra attributes entries that let me manually specify a value. Does one have to manually add/expose the attribute in order to edit it?

[jbuttell]

Vladimir,

I restarted again and noticed the vray material is working, the extra options are available so I was able to set the texture from 32x32 to default (4096) and now it seems to display properly. I'm not sure why it is breaking, but I'm glad it does seem to work some of the time. I'll post any more specifics as I find them.

Maybe a more generic maya question, or it's just my system, but any reason textures shouldnt' display when in high-quality mode?

[vladimir.nedev]

The hardware texture options may disappear (or at least some of them) when you have meshes with exactly the same name in the scene. We use the Maya scripts for this and they get confused in that situation. So renaming your meshes to have unique names should solve the problem.
You also need to restart Maya since once they break, even opening a new scene will have problems with the hardware texturing. The same thing happens with Maya materials as well.

I've added the blend_amount to the list of texture channels of the VRayBlend material. Should be there in newer builds.

As for the combined texture, again, Maya makes the "combining", I am not sure how exactly.

As for the high quality display, we still haven't figured out a way to show out materials correctly in that mode. Seems the mental ray materials have the same problem.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[jbuttell]

thanks very much for the answers Vladimir, and adding the blend_amount to the list of texture channels! Definitely appreciated.