black texture problem

Corona Corona for Cinema 4D General
1

Hello,
We are working with my friend on two versions of c4d r20. One in english and one in French
We are using Oct 15 2018 corona build (did not test yet the last build).

For the matter of an actual project, we encountered a problem with the loading of textures at the time of scene opening. ( we are not 100% sure it is a problem of language).
They render black on certain materials : each texture are loaded in the material but not active. To activate them we need to manually click on 'Layerset >Select and choose ‘Background’ or ‘arrière-plan’.

R19 creates the same problem, with our versions, while r18 seems to load the textures correctly.

Do you have any clue on how to fix this? as we would like to stay on R20 for this project.

Thanks in advance,

Nelaton

2

Here is a problematic file. Nothing special. But parquet texture render black in the viewport in our R20, while the concrete one appears .
test_black material.rar (6.43 MB)

3

Hi, I just opened your file and shazam! The textures are there, load and render fine. The only black render I got was there was no light source :wink:

test.jpg
test.jpg992×701 239 KB

test.jpg
test.jpg992×701 239 KB

4

PS, you might want to choose a texture that doesn’t have such a visible watermark on it :wink:

5

Also, black materials can occur when & after the Converter is used.
Icons get rendered fine, but with IR or rendered every material shows black —> fix: Texture Manager > Relink Textures…

6

Thanks for your replies.
@Beanvizion: did you try to open the file in a c4d with french language loaded? This is part of our problem.
yep, did not see the watermark, sorry for this :).
Then, i admit we have a bunch of plugins and this might be the source too.
This would be nice to tell me if you could reproduce our problem with a french version c4d r20. Because,
I guarantee you at this point, this is a problem for us.

@burnin: relink textures is not an option unfortunately as they are already linked (texture manager show them in relative path)
and they are in the texture path of the mat. Really it is just a problem of finding the ones that are not loaded at start stage, and for them go in the layerset option
and select background. This can be very tedious for large scenes.

Nelaton

7

yes I tested the file with a language other than English C4D 19 the texture is black.
if I go back to English the texture is visible.

8

This is good news sylbot, thanks for your test. My first guess is that c4d misinterprets and don’t translate the ‘background’ name of the file texture when it comes to
another language. In our case, french. Can you tell us, corona team, if this is solvable in a near release or strictly a c4d problem?

Thanks again,

Nelaton

9

We’ll check this out, Nelaton. This issue is really interesting. Just out of curiosity - are you by any chance using french special characters in your filenames? Neither of us is French here, but Czech characters are equally as weird as the French ones (maybe even more) and we usually try not to use them in filenames precisely for the reason that a lot of applications cannot cope with them.

That said, I’m not making any excuses. This is definitely a bug that needs to be fixed… Now, let’s just hope it’s on our side so that it can be fixed.

10

Thanks a lot Houska. It use to work with r18. But R18 do not support stack material, which is essential for us.

To answer your question, there’s no accent in the file name we are using. But probably in our textures names.

We don’t have access to the strings of c4d, so we cannot change the accent of ‘arrière-plan’. but i think this is the problem:

Attached, you’ll see that c4d clearly translate ‘layer : Arrière-plan’ as Background, when clicking on ‘select..’

Can you keep us informed, Thanks in advance,

Nelaton

accent_translation.jpg
accent_translation.jpg663×621 117 KB

11

Can you please send us simple scene with two materials (Cinema and Corona one) including the image assets to allow us to compare them and find the problem? Because we can’t really say what is the exact setup of the material and the shader just from your screenshot.

Thank you
Nikola

12

Sure, I’ll do this in MP, thanks.
Nelaton

13

Nikola, i just sent you the scene.

Nelaton

14

Thank you for the scene. Now I understand the issue, but I am afraid that this is Cinema problem, not the Corona one. Your friend can make a simple scene with just standard Cinema material, select the arrière-plan for Layer Set e.g. for the Diffuse channel, send the scene to you and you should have the same problem. I would simply ask your friend to switch the Cinema to English or you can switch your Cinema to French.

Nikola

15

I think we need more time to test the c4d native materials from one language to another. Can’t say much more. Thanks for your answer.
I hope this can be solved..
Let me know if you come to something. What a about asking Maxon directly?

16

Every 3rd party render engine in C4D is confronted with the same ‘engineering flaw’ (at least on windows).
Awareness and User discretion is advised.

17

I’m curious, would this problem go away completely if you simply eliminated all accents? Just use “Arriere-plan” instead of “Arrière-plan”?

I mean, what’s the point of being grammatically correct just for the behind the scenes files, right? This seems like how some servers don’t like spaces in file names, or apostrophes, commas, slashes, etc.

18

@ Nikola & burnin
One thing i don’t get is that it only affect some ‘random’ materials and textures. The other ones present in our scene loads very fine.
Plus, as a side note, i remember working with R19 on some old corona builds and translation of mats and textures wasn’t causing problems.

@BigAl3d,
We are investigating, as the problem is occuring and so every possibility as to be taken into account.
But for the same reasons mentionned above, I’m not 100% sure it’s a language translation problem dealing with the c4d core.