material thumbnail preview quality in SP3

[jasonhuang1115]

Hi,

In SP3, as the default setting for "use local subdivs" is disabled, the material thumbnail previews in Attribute Editor is very noisy. It makes it harder to quickly gauge a material when it has eg. 0.6 glossiness on reflection and refraction and some bump map plugged in. Is there a workaround so that I don't need to go enable the "use local subdivs" and dial up subdivs value for a material for decent quality of thumbnail preview?

I understand we have viewport RT and the Material Window in Hypershade (for Maya 2016), but it is still pretty handy to have that quick thumbnail preview when dialing in some of the attributes without waiting for fully raytraced results in RT or Material Window (also, the Material Window slows down UI interactivity a lot....)

[yolov]

When the local subdivs are disabled, the actual local subdivs value will be grayed out, but still visible.
I think there's a bug there, but it is a bit different. The swatch in AE always takes the local subdivs. We should rework this.
If the above description is correct, all you need to do to work around this for the moment is to enable local subdivs, set them to 8 (for example) locally in your material and then disable them again.

[jasonhuang1115]

When the local subdivs are disabled, the actual local subdivs value will be grayed out, but still visible.
I think there's a bug there, but it is a bit different. The swatch in AE always takes the local subdivs. We should rework this.
If the above description is correct, all you need to do to work around this for the moment is to enable local subdivs, set them to 8 (for example) locally in your material and then disable them again.

This is exactly what I was talking about. I need to enable "use local subdivs", set it to some value that is high enough to get a smoother thumbnail preview, and then disable the "use local subdivs" for rendering...
Not ideal when doing this for each material though...Based on this logic, I am curious how to rework on this so that one can keep the "use local subdivs" off all the time while having decent thumbnail preview in AE (if the default refl/refract subdiv is 8 )?

[yolov]

Until we fix it, you can still change them with MEL script for example: setAttr "VRayMtl1.refractionSubdivs" 10;

[jasonhuang1115]

Thanks yolov...