Vertex Normals / Normal Smoothing and Scene Refreshes

[Steffen Dünner]

Hi there,

just noticed some weird vertex normals in an old scene and found that it was caused by the newly introduced "Smoothing" and "Smoothing Angle" parameters in V-Ray Materials inside MODO (which is a great addition! ).
After adjusting them, there was no visible change when re-rendering the scene. I had to completely restart MODO and reload the scene to have V-Ray notice the update.
The same goes when I try to simply bake the smoothing settings of a (MODO) material in a vertex normal map. I have to reload the scene to get a visible update.
Sometimes e.g. when I use the "Transform Normals" tool on the vertex normal map, V-Ray instantly notices the changes and refreshes correctly.

So my question: Is there a simple way to force V-Ray for MODO to refresh the scene or even better can this issue be fixed so updates are instant?

Thanks
Steffen

[vladimir.nedev]

For the V-Ray materials, I think it is enough to disable and then enable the V-Ray material that you are changing the smoothing parameters of.
This is will trigger MODO to recalculate the smooth normals based on the new value, and when you render again with V-Ray, you will see the correct
normals (also the correct normals will show in MODO's OpenGL view-port and preview render).

I've asked the MODO guys if it is possible to auto-trigger the update, but haven't got an answer yet.

This thread has some more discussions on this issue : http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...rial-smoothing

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev