[Ernesto]

Hello,
I have seen that many of you works with references mxm's.
I wonder whay is the advantage or the eventual disadvantage of such aproach.
Ernesto

[Fernando Tella]

There are two things that make it worth for me:
-It helps building, keeping updated and improving my personal material library over the time;
-as 3dsmax is quite prone to crash, all the work done to materials is saved independently and not lost upon disaster.

On the other hand I like to make emitter materials embedded as I make quite frequent changes to wattage or color and those changes are not meaningful enough to save as a different mxm and I like to have them at hand.

You also have to be organized in the way you store your mxm files.

[garyswindell]

The ability to create and maintain a library is invaluable. I can't even imagine having to create materials manually in a scene. 95% or more of all the work I do uses materials already in the library.

Pack and go in the Maya plugin does not copy dependencies for referenced mxms currently. So if you want to render on a machine that won't have the same mappings to your mxm library the workaround is to export the mxs from Maya and open in Studio. The pack and go function there DOES copy dependencies for referenced mxm's.

[Ernesto]

Thanks, fernandotella & garyswindell

Yes, that is great!
I will start doing it!
I have one more question: I use to work with very complex files, and in order to simplify the work, as well as minimize the risks of eventual crashes, which could result in corrupt files, I separate the scene in diferent parts.
All those parts, usually from 5 to 15 diferent files, are referenced into a "mother" scene, where I have the cameras.
I use to assign materials in the partial models, instead of the "mother" scence, so if I adopt the referenced materials aproach, I will have them referenced twice, as follows:
Part1 with a referenced material A, which is a reference into the "mother" scene.
Is that possible or you see a potential problem here.
Thanks again!

Ernesto

[limbus]

Reference Materials and Layered Materials both have advantages and disadvantages.
You can easily move MXMs from project to project but you have to adjust all texture path by hand. If you use Layered Materials, you can fix textures within Maya with tools like FIleTextureManager. You can also do some nice things with MEL or Phython with Layered Materials.
Reference Materials are nice if you work with multiple people on a project and one material is used in different scenes. Layered Materials are much faster to edit from within Maya and you can do stuff like mix two textures for displacement.
So its not that easy to decide. I regularly mix both in a scene based on my needs. If you want to build a texture library (which is a good idea), you can always export to MXM once a project is finished. You can also use MEL to automate this.

Cheers, Florian