Material duplicates after block insertion

[TomaszGronczewski]

Hello,
I don't know if it is a bug or is there any new function in VRay 3.4 I just overlooked.
With Rhino 5 and VRay 1.0 while inserting a block and opening a file with nested blocks I had an option to overwrite material with a similar material used in a block or to add new material.
Now (Rhino 5.14.522.8390 & VRay 3.40.1) there is no such prompt. In consequence every opening of the file creates a new non-removable instance of a material. Thus I have teens of instances of the same material that I can't manage.
Any thoughts?
Tomasz

[Grigio18]

hello Tomas.Initially it was a choice of developers to remove the menu and create everytimre a new material ... but obviously they have never used nested blocks .. I can only tell you that they are working on it and I think that next update we will have the menu back again..

[TomaszGronczewski]

Grigio,
thank you for the reply. So this is an intentional feature removal... I work with big files with a lot of blocks nested in order to reduce file size, so I miss it. I am very happy to hear that the feature is coming back.
ut even if it was intentional, it still doesn't work how it should. I would live with a couple of materials coming from a couple of various blocks. But now if the material is present once in one block only (eg. "Aluminum relief" material in a block "A"), and there is only one instance of this block in the drawing, every opening and saving the file generates additional unnecessary instance of the material. For example after opening and saving the file twenty times (without doing anything else) I have twenty instances of the material (Aluminum relief, Aluminum relief#2, Aluminum relief#3, ... Aluminum relief#20). These materials are impossible to clean up in any way, neither purging unnecessary materials nor deleting them manually. I know, I should have started this topic in the bug department...
Also if materials are duplicated by block insertion I would really love to have them named in such a way, that would denote from where they are coming from (e.g. "Aluminum relief#3::Block A").
Best,
Tomasz.

[fpedrogo]

We fixed that issue and it will be available in the next release. We are Planning to release a new build next month.

[TomaszGronczewski]

This is great news! Thank you for the info.
Tomasz

[mnewberg]

This is the direction we went with the dialog.

[TomaszGronczewski]

Matt, this is exactly what I need! As I have written above, I work with rather big files (old aircraft by the way) and I split the model into components in order to reduce file size. But many of these components, placed as linked blocks, use the same materials like for example "spruce", "plywood", "poplar", "old brass" etc. I store most recent versions of these materials saved as vrmat files and I do my best to maintain them as "a single source of truth". Thus I try to maintain single instances of materials in entire model.
Best,
Tomasz

[frip51]

This is the direction we went with the dialog.

Hello Matt,
could you please explain the intended functionality?
The dialog won't behave as in previous versions, as posted in here: https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...424#post975424

Working with blocks has become a real pain since we switched to 3.40...

Thank you,
Matthias

[Peter.Chaushev]

As mentioned in https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...erials-handled issues with Block operations, including the Material Conflict window, should be resolved in the upcoming v3.6.

Kind regards,
Peter

[Ibear888]

I recently encountered the same or very similar issue after installing Update 1. I too use nested blocks.

[toniboni]

So, this is something I have been complaning about a lot. I have posted several threads about this issue and believe me, now that I found out this still is an issue after upgrading to vray 5 I'm really dissapointed. Please bring back the old menu! Add an option to hide it, so if someone feels offended by it, he can just switch it off. But if you work with proxies, it still is super annoying. Thank you!