Multi Material - Appear Disappear when switching mats

[delineator]

Hey all, I got another real weird one - I have a fairly simple tree from Maxtree that I've created into a vray vrmesh proxy via transmutr. Everything comes in fine and works, however, when I load the component later, the needle mats will appear/disappear depending on if I choose another material. In my example below, there are 2 leaf mats, a trunk and a branch mat. When doing a rendering, the leaves do not show at first. However, if I change one of the leaf mats to any other material, they pop in. I change it back to the leaf, and it pops back. Yah! However, if I stop and start the rendering, they disappear again. I've tried just about everything and can't seem to figure it out. I can provide files if need be.

in case gif attachment doesn't work (which it definitely doesn't and I can't figure out how to remove it):
https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/d...leaf+magic.gif

[delineator]

so I think I have it resolved, though I don't understand why. When you create a vrmesh proxy via transmutr, it seems to want to be wrapped inside another skp and then that whole file is saved out to be used with proper materials. For example, once the transmutr proxy skp is formed, its about 20mb. I bring that into a model (using component finder, for what its worth), and then right click on the component and save as, its down to 3mb BUT this file doesn't work (see gif above). However, if I save that entire skp file to our asset library (file>save as), back up to 10mb and it does work.

But why can't you just use the direct transmutr'd file? good question - i don't know, but it doesn't render the thumbnail correctly nor do they show up in component finder. all around weird.

[konstantin_chaos]

Hi delineator,

Can you please describe the whole process of creating the tree, export and importing it?
Why not export a vrmesh directly from 3ds Max ?

[delineator]

Hi Konstantin, for your second question - its because I have to manually recreate all the materials from scratch, which is a total pain - if you know of a way to get the vrmesh out of Max and into SKP without having to recreate the full mat/shader tree, I'd would absolutely love to hear it. But the issue is that I don't want to and don't have time to manually recreate the 4-10 materials on each vrmesh, multiplied by hundreds of trees/furn/etc etc. Transmutr makes it super easy as it somewhat intelligently knows which normal/diffuse/refl/opacity map to pull from and automatically creates the material stack when you import the model (and FBX in this situation). I'll list out the steps below best I can - I would also be happy to show you the exact process via a conference call/screenshare (go2mtg, google mtgs, appear.in, etc etc). However, last time a support issue came up, CG insisted on using a teamviewer remote session, which is 100% not OK. I'm still pretty frosty about this and I'm equally surprised no one has convinced CG to adopt a less intrusive and more secure (for the end user) way of seeing our screens and providing support. Teamviewer is just too powerful and therefore, IMHO, dangerous.

Sorry to stray off topic, steps below:

-Got the tree from maxtree.org (good trees, also come in FBX format, which is a must for my current workflow)

-drag FBX file into transmutr and adjust settings (up axis, scale, make sure it finds the textures for it to automatically create the multi material stack).

-

-transmutr can either save as a straight SKP file with raw mesh OR convert to a vrmesh proxy. I save as a vrmesh proxy, so it saves the vrmesh file and the SKP file as a container for the materials


-This SKP file (which we'll call the "raw skp file") however is not editable as you get an error box:



and can not be imported into a working SKP file using component finder as it doesn't recognize the file or show a thumbnail (Component Finder is our preferred way to store and sort SKP components for our asset library)

https://flextools.cc/componentfinder/

-To workaround this, the raw skp file has to be imported into sketchup (file/import). From here, it brings in the vrmesh multi mat stack, which can be edited, and the whole file must be saved out as the final proxy skp file (file/save). This is the critical moment though - you can save components directly out of skp by right clicking and selecting save as. However, if you did this, the tree would exhibit the odd issues in my gif above. Instead, it must be saved as a whole file (again, file/save), and then that final proxy skp is good to import into working models.

-I know it seems a bit crazy, but there is a minimum number of containers the vrmesh has to be wrapped in to hold its materials and work properly in a file. In the screencap below, the top one is wrong and will exhibit the issues shown above in my gif, the bottom one is correct and works as expected.