asset tracking

[v-cube]

Hello, here is another wish:

It would be very great to be able to see all textures used in a scene and to relink them to another path in the network.
Very often I am forced to work with old scenes that had project specific textures, the projects are moved to different locations after the projects are finished, so the links to the textures in the materials get broken and have to be reestablished by hand, which is very time consuming...

If a full featured asset manager is not possible it would at least be great to be able to tell vray to look in a specific folder including sub-folders to find the missing textures...

best regards

Andreas

[tashko.zashev]

Hi,

This request is added to our "to do" list.

[v-cube]

cool, thank you!

Andy

[wcmansp]

We've taken an approach to this that works for our situation. Adding a V-Ray material to a file adds the search path to its folder location; V-Ray searches through all the search paths it knows (ie. the search paths for all materials that have been added) when it can't find a material in a given location. We've set up two large material collections. One is organized in a "human" way -- folders organized by type of material, then broken into sub-folders with specific materials and their components, however people would expect to locate materials to use. The other contains a copy of just the component files from all these materials but in one single folder (no "previews", no sub-folders) -- ie. all the .vismats, all the .pngs for all the materials but in one big grouping. By adding one material from this folder to the Rhino file, all the others are now available for search. This depends on what we've found so far to be true -- materials (at least freely available materials) are uniquely named (except for the "Preview" files, but those are not used in the second folder and can be deleted). By setting this up in a two folder configuration, users can select and pull down materials in the way they're used to and put them anywhere they want on their machines (no need to manage paths); V-Ray will still find them when it comes time to render as long as they've included one material from the second folder.

If this makes sense in your situation but currently different users have put different materials in different spots, one way to consolidate would be to have them configure their files for "Distributed Rendering" and use the "Send to server" option. When they start the render (they don't need to actually complete the render this way) all the materials used in the file get copied to this server location. If this folder is on a server accessible to all users, and all users choose the same destination, you should end up with a single collection of all the materials that have been used in their files so far. This would be equivalent to the second folder above. If one of these Rhino files was then moved to another machine any material included from that server folder (eg. create a dummy .vismat file in that folder and then add it to the file) would result in all materials being found.

Having V-Ray hunt through sub-folders would eliminate the need for the second folder but this has worked for us.

[v-cube]

I have opened a new thread...

http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...904#post594904

Andreas