Light Cache Stop

I thought we got past this. I am getting huge LC est and I can’t stop it. I hit stop, it looks like it’ll stop, but it starts counting again. I have been trying to cancel for about 15 minutes, so I’ll have to crash MAX. If there is anything I can do to avoid this, best practice, please let me know. NEXT 2 and MAX 2019.

It was a Raytrace material in my scene. I was troubleshooting and the only thing that seems to brick my scene is raytrace and sure enough, it was a raytrace material. If you don’t have it, the FixUtility script is a lifesaver. It is the only script I have found to help find raytrace materials with a click of a button.

The V-Ray scene converter shipped with the standard V-Ray installer converts Raytrace materials without issue.

It doesn’t work for me and never has. I convert all my scenes before I hit render. I think I remember a discussion about it not converting it when it is a multi-material or something like that. I’ll make the scene simple and post it.

An example will be very helpful - thanks!

Best regards,
Vlado

yes please, provide for a scene.
I tested it before replying, and also looked at the code, which is no different than that of all the other shader types, so it’s very puzzling it shouldn’t work for you.

Here you go.

Bobby thanks for the file.
I can’t make sense of the shader setup, how did you “convert” it?
Do you have a file with the converted shader?

I ask because those were raytrace maps, not materials, in places where they make no sense whatsoever (mixers in the diffuse color, or in the bump…), so it’s not like the converter didn’t work because of a bug, but rather because the logic for the setup cannot be figured out, and so there is no alternative to it.
I think we should be popping boxes with warning when these things come up.

Pending the “fixed” scene, we may try and implement what worked for you, but a “1:1 conversion” of that shader isn’t possible that i can see.

I sent the scene to someone, so they can do the landscape plane for me. They returned the file and that is when the problem started. I removed all their landscape stuff, the problem persisted, so I tracked the problem down to the wall material. The person had no reason to change the wall material, so I am not sure what happened.

Yeah, it has three raytrace maps in the bump slot, and in the diffuse one set as mixer map between a gray color (inside an empty CC map…) and black.
I am not sure this is a solvable issue: we could replace the map with a vraycolor, because it’s not in one of the two places it categorically needs to be in (those being the specular, or opacity slot), but it becomes problematic to pick which color to assign to it.
Black would work if the map was alone, or if the operation it was subject to was a “plus” or a “minus” (you’ll notice the wall shader uses v-ray composite textures), but it would need to be white if the operation was a division or multiplication.

I fear the only way out of this is manual labour.
We should still try and detect these cases to warn the user, i think.