[jfrancis]

This could be due to my ignorance on how to handle references in Maya, but I am texturing a rigged vehicle in Maxwell that was partially textured in Mental Ray and for some reason I am not seeing the Maxwell shaders show up in the animation file that references the rigged file.

[Mihnea Balta]

The plug-in can't really control anything in that area, so I don't think it can cause problems even if it wanted to. :) Could you give me more details about the set-up?

[jfrancis]

I have a rigged vehicle with wheels on mechanical legs so it has a vaguely humanoid structure.

I have about a dozen animations that reference it.

The vehicle has some MR shaders in the reference file and apparently a few more Mental Ray shaders in some of the animation files.

When I add Maxwell shaders to the reference file they remain there, but they never show up in the animations.

I tried importing the rigged vehicle into an animation but the animation itself doesn't apply anymore.

I am now texturing the vehicle in one of the animation files, with the plan of exporting that and referencing it into the other 11 animation files.

[jfrancis]

So far it's looking like I have to hand re-texture a dozen shots.

[jfrancis]

It refuses to let go of the Mental Ray shaders, even if I import the object into the scene through the reference editor instead of just referencing it.

[Mihnea Balta]

Could you send me a set of scene files (animation scene and referenced scene) so I can take a look?

[jfrancis]

I think it may have to do with paths not being the same.

I'll send you a scene.

[jfrancis]

It's very sporadic: for a given file sometimes no Maxwell shaders attach. Sometimes a few do. Sometimes all do. It's random.

[jfrancis]

Could you send me a set of scene files (animation scene and referenced scene) so I can take a look?

Just scene files?

Or sourceimages folder with all textures, too? (that will be about 1 GB)

We are just uploading scene files (referencer and referencee) for now

[Mihnea Balta]

I think only the scene files will be enough.

[jfrancis]

Should be uploaded 2 hours from when it started, I'm told

[jfrancis]

Any clues in those files?

[Mihnea Balta]

I've looked at some of the objects which have lost their Maxwell shaders and it looks like regular Maya shaders have been assigned to them in the animation scene. For example, take "bodyparts_26Shape", which is a trapezoidal thingy on top of the vehicle, behind the hatch. In the original file it uses a Maxwell material called "Bare_Metal_02". However, in the animation scene, the material is overridden with a Blinn shader. If you go to File -> List Reference Edits in the reference editor, and filter with the string "bodyparts_26Shape", you will see an explicit override to "roy_rig:etb_roy_bodyparts7_map", which is the Blinn shader.

If you select the override in the reference editor, hit "Remove Selected Edits", save the scene and reopen it, the Maxwell material will be back. Please note that you must save and reload, Maya thinks the object doesn't have a material until you do that (that's one of the many problems with references in Maya).

I don't think this has anything to do with the plug-in, those shaders have been explicitly assigned, and removing them is a pain with Maya's reference tools. You could write a script which removes all the material overrides from the animation scene, but it's not trivial.

[jfrancis]

Much appreciated. Will check it out.

[jfrancis]

Unfortunately it didn't work. There is something very persistent about these MR shaders.

I can't even delete them from the hypershade.

--

unless I explicitly import the reference, then at least the labels aren't red anymore and I can delete the shaders.