Does this 3dsmax 2014 feature work okay with vray 3? I have never used it before and I am about to tackle a very large project that I would love to break down into 15 - 20 separate scenes for ease of animating.
If i can xreference the textures then I place placeholder textures onto all objects before forking the project and then can work on those textures separately to each scene and have them automatically update texture wise in all the scenes.
about xref textures:
XRef Materials have been in max for years, but they are… to quote Grant Warwick “a total piece of shit”, they will work fine with VRay, but you need to have a reference to an XRef Object File in your scene too for them to work, which is so counter-intuitive…
I made my own material referencing system once upon a time, I might release it at some point…
I have used Xref-materials for a few small projects and I haven’t got any issues with it.
However,it wasn’t very useful because it is not possible to tweak material in the master-scene, it is only possible to do it in the material-scene.
Furthermore, when loading xref-material it is only possible to pick materials assigned to an object, if material is not linked to geometry it is not possible to use it as xref-material.
Does not seem to be a huge problem… I can work with that, it beats updating the material in multiple scenes. Can always leave a 2nd max open with the material scene in it just for working on that aspect.
You could use two instances yes but unfortunately material is not updated automatically in the master-scene, you should first save the material-scene and then re-open master-scene in order to reload changes you’ve made. This is not very efficient and useful since it will make Vray RT useless and for every single change of the material you should save one scene, re-open another one and render.
Soooo…any chance that Chaos could whip up a “Xref” type material system where the material is editable, and continuously puplishes the changes to the master material file (on the network).
Have it password protected so only special and important people can edit it of course :).
If cloned, a new material with only the new tweaks are saved (like a diff), and all other unchanged parameters can still be linked back to the original…
Without thinking too deeply about this, it seems like a really good idea.
Yes if the max xref material is not too good, I think vray could make that a headline feature 
Don’t really want to wait to vray 4 for it tho!
I wonder if there are other 3rd party plugins that do this?
I’m not sure how far we can go with that with the 3ds Max materials (esp. the material properties overrides), but it might be easier with the .vrmat materials… will have think about both possibilities.
I think someone had posted a screenshot of something like an X-Ref material that they developed, but I can’t seem to find it now.
Best regards,
Vlado
Was it this?
Something I put on the AD Beta forums a while back…
Might release it at some point 
any point in time soon?
say, before next week when i start this job?
+1 on that xmat Dave. That would be very useful
I’m working on a few referencing scripts at the moment, how would also like to be able to treat XRefScene’s as object and set material overrides and property overrides?
D
:shock: Really? that would be… awesome
I came here specifically to ask about exactly this! Hope to get either the script or a native implementation someday.
Also, a question for Vlado… Is there any notable performance hits when using the standard 3ds max shell material?
I have a scene with around 50 different objects that needs to be rendered with two different material setups (Multi/Sub objects) but because they are grouped with other objects with their own object-specific materials I can’t simply select them and replace the materials. The shell material provides a simple workaround although it only supports two materials. My concern though is if there’s a performance hit with it, even a small one, that will slow things down a lot when rendering 200+ images.
If there’s no impact on performance then it’s fine, but if there is; would it be possible to have a native Vray shell material? Maybe one that could support more than two material slots?
I would download RPManager, install the demo, and then use just the RPMMaterial which allows you to put a load of materials into a list and change a spinner value to choose which one to use for that particular render.
I would prefer not having my scenes rely on too many outside plugins, but I will take a look. Thanks for the hint.