Materials not updating in viewport

[tioem]

Hey,

For some reason my materials stopped to update themselves in the viewport when using V-ray materials.

Example: When changing the Diffuse color in V-Ray Material nothing is updated in the viewport but it works fine when it is getting rendered.

If I change the 'Ray GL: off' to 'Ray GL: full/fast/bake' it works fine, but that is not a good solution.

Tried to reset Modo and update to the latest version. It worked fine yesterday but now it doesn't. Ideas?

-t

[vladimir.nedev]

Are you sure it worked yesterday.
As far as I know, MODO has always ignored everything but its Advanced material, when it comes to the OpenGL view-port.
So, that's a limitation of the MODO API, that we can't provide a OpenGL viewport color.

Only workaround we can provide is have some sort of scheme, where a MODO material is added right below the V-Ray one,
with its colors defined from connections from the V-Ray material.

When you enable "Ray GL", that's actually MODO's render engine, for which we have a simple implementation of our material.
The same thing is not possible for the OpenGL viewport.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[tioem]

Interesting. I could have sworn that it worked fine the whole last week when I started experimenting with V-ray in Modo. Maybe I've finally gone insane.

Anyway I attached an image in this post with the following question: Is it possible to reverse this function so the V-ray material diffuse changes the Standard material diffuse? So I can completely ignore the standard material as much as possible?

-t

[vladimir.nedev]

It's possible, you can use the Channel Link editor. I haven't added output plugs for these channels, to avoid confusion, since they are input channels.

For the nightly build from 2016.03.03 I've added a command that creates the MODO material and makes the connections from the V-Ray material to the MODO material.

You can run the command from the V-Ray material UI:



It will create this rig:



Here is a comparison between V-Ray RT and MODO's advanced viewport in MODO 902 SP1:



Note that this rig works only for simple values, textures won't work (except the diffuse texture).

Also, the .vrscene import command has a new option to create viewport materials for each imported material:



Note that the new MODO advanced viewport has some trouble with static meshes, like the ones the .vrscene import command creates.
It sometimes doesn't show diffuse/bump textures on them. This can be fixed by converting the static meshes to normal MODO meshes.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[BVA]

This looks like a good solution! I am curious if it will slow down a scene with hundreds of materials?

[tioem]

Looks like a nice solution! What are these nightly builds that I keep reading about from thread to thread? Are they available for download from somewhere?

-t

[vladimir.nedev]

This looks like a good solution! I am curious if it will slow down a scene with hundreds of materials?

It definitely slowed down the .vrscene import of some Evermotion Archinteriors scenes I tried. I may need to figure out why this happens at some point.

It might also slow down MODO's OpenGL viewport. After all, MODO ignores the V-Ray materials, so if you had a scene with only V-Ray materials,
it would use just the default MODO material that is at the bottom of the shader tree. If you create these GL preview materials, MODO will have a lot more to work with it.
If you want to increase the OpenGL viewport performace, you can turn off the Shader Tree entirely, by disabling "3D viewport options -> Visibility -> Performance -> Use Shader Tree".

As for rendering, it shouldn't be affected. Export might be affected somewhat, since V-Ray for MODO will still try to export the GL preview materials.
But then the V-Ray material on top will override them completely, so rendering will be the same as without the preview materials.

If you have a scene with a lot of V-Ray materials, you could easily try it.
Just Shift click on the Render item twice to make all groups open up, select everything in the shader tree and click the "Crete OpenGL viewport preview material" button.
All V-Ray materials will have the preview materials created. Might take a while, if there are a lot of them, and there is no progress bar, so have that in mind.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[vladimir.nedev]

Looks like a nice solution! What are these nightly builds that I keep reading about from thread to thread? Are they available for download from somewhere?

-t

Yes, you need to send an e-mail to support@chaosgroup.com with your chaosgroup.com login name (not the forums.chaosgroup.com one),
requesting access to the nightly builds for the V-Ray for MODO Beta.
They are instructed to give everyone access since this is a beta and we want as many people as possible to test the latest changes.

Usually we restrict the access to avoid having too many different builds out there.
Note that all the latest changes to the V-Ray core are in the nightly builds, so some of them might be unstable.
But that's the idea, to find the bugs as early as possible. So by using the nightly builds, you will help us.

Edit: it's a national holiday here, so you might have to wait until Monday for an answer.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev