RT Texture mapping issue

[Bruce Hart]

Hey,
just now I was rendering a very simple massing model. I have a ground plane mapped with a Jpeg (a google maps image in a networked job folder - I'll call it A.jpg). The texture size is 2500 pixels wide. RT renders this with no texture, but the production renderer is fine. I then applied a completley new Vray material to the ground plane with with a different diffuse map (just a random bitmap in my library - I'll call it B.jpg). RT now renders this correctly with b.jpg applied. BTW this object plane has UVW mapping applied.

OK so I'm thinking there must be a setting in the previous material somewhere that RT does not like. In this new material I simply change the diffuse slot to A.jpg that I wanted, and once again RT renders with no texture, but the production render does. I then change the same material diffuse back to B.jpg and RT does not render this now either, even though it did perfectly fine before. In fact no other bitmaps in this material will render in RT from this point on. It's like the material becomes corrupted somehow for RT, and no UVW is applied.

For the life of me, I can't work out what is going wrong. This applies for CPU and GPU. Max 2012 on Win 7 Ultimate - 12GB RAM, FX1800 Quadro, Dual Xeon E5520s. I am closing and restarting the Activeshade viewport each time. There are no material overrides on or distributed rendering. I closed and restarted Max, but the same thing happened. Is there some kind of texture size limit I should be aware of?

I'm discombobulated

[Alan Iglesias]

Don't know if this will help or not, but I've had a significant number of issues regarding RT's handling of bitmaps in general. I typically take the offending bitmap into PhotoShop and save it as something else, and then all is good.

Just a guess - but perhaps RT is having a tough time resampling that bitmap down to the max bitmap resolution before rendering or something like that.

-Alan

[Bruce Hart]

Thanks for the reply - yeah I tried exactly that too - I sampled down the bitmap to something low res (600 pixels) and saved as a different name. It still didn't render the texture in RT, while the production renderer did render.

[Alan Iglesias]

Did you try another file type?

-Alan

[Bruce Hart]

Hi - yes I tried saving the Jpeg as a png - still didn't render

[Alan Iglesias]

Try a .tga for heck of it. 24 bit.

-Alan

[Bruce Hart]

OK - I've had a breakthrough I think. As mentioned I've had no problem rendering the bitmaps in the production renderer. So my computer/Max/Vray can read the bitmaps from any network mapped drives no problem. RT could render bitmaps from my usual Library folders on a certain server drive (Mapped drive L ), however It stopped rendering the texture when I called up another bitmap from a different drive letter (This is X: Drive BTW). I changed the MAX preferences to use UNC and now RT renders the bitmaps no problems from any drive my computer can see.

That's cool, however this seems to indicate that RT has a different way of handeling network location names than the production renderer. Is this a bug Vlado? Maybe it is something kooky with my office network setup, but I thought I should let you guys know about this.

[Alan Iglesias]

Interesting. I hope they can straighten this out with you.

-Alan

[Bruce Hart]

Cool - Alan - thanks for keeping an eye on this thread anyway