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Good morning Jeremy,
I am following up on a thread from April 13, 2010 “Moving Rhino files with Maxwell mateials”. You seem to indicate that once a material (meaning the .mxm file for it) is in the Scene Manager’s Materials tab it is embedded (right word?) in the file therefore you can take the Rhino file (the .3dm) to someone else’s machine that has Rhino and Maxwell and the file will not be missing the material. However, Bjorn said that “the textures are still separate, and referred to by the material, at their respective locations around your hard drive.” Does this mean that the file is not complete? Do you have to take a folder containing the textures along with the .3dm?

Your answer to this would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Cosmas Demetriou

Yes, Bjorn is correct, the materials contained in the Materials tab of the Scene Manager are written directly into the Rhino document, but any external files those materials may reference are not. Probably the quickest way to gather them all up in order to move to another machine would be to enable the Pack and Go feature in Scene Manager > Output, then export an MXS to the same directory where the .3dm you are currently working with resides. All referenced files will be copied to a /textures folder at that location. When you subsequently move the .3dm and this /textures folder to another machine, even though the materials the .3dm contains will have invalid paths, the textures will be found, because the plugin will check for the existence of this /textures folder.

Another option is to use the Search Paths in plugin Options to establish a common directory where you store textures on each machine, such that opening just the .3dm at either location, the textures will be found by virtue of their being located at a path found in the Search Paths.

Any way of actually embedding textures within the 3dm file theoretically?

Most things are possible theoretically, but I don't think it would be appropriate for the plugin to do that when the rest of the Maxwell ecosystem does not work that way. Not to mention that in practice, it would end up working almost no differently than the Pack and Go solution; I can't change how Maxwell works, so immediately upon opening the .3dm, I would have to write all the textures out to a /textures folder on the disk. Now, when you save again, what? Do I stick all the files back into the .3dm and delete the /textures folder to clean up? Do I do this every time you open/close a .3dm? What if, in the meantime, you reference one of these textures in an MXS, MXM or another file? Not to mention that where with Rhino materials you might be talking about a few megabytes of textures, you are easily talking about .3dm files some GBs in size if you try to embed all the textures some people reference in their materials; all of these textures would have to be read and stored every time you save or auto-save.

I think it could make sense to do that if Maxwell embedded textures in MXS and MXM files, because there would be parity between the plugin and the system it is emulating and integrating with. But with that not being the case, I don't think it would be good for the plugin to do it, especially when you already have what is essentially the same, although more explicit, capability via the Pack and Go strategy.

That makes total sense