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Has anyone else had trouble with grass where it does not use the material you specify in the grass window and it instead comes out grey?
This was a problem I often had with Version 2 and the only way I could find to fix it was create a new material and re-assign the material in the grass menu. (re-doing what I had already done) and then it would work. Now I just did a rendering which I did a test render on my desktop (with 3.0.0.1) and it was green as expected.. so I did a pack and go to final render on another computer... and grey grass. What am I doing wrong?

Does the assigned material link to an MXM file? If so, is that MXM file (and any textures it uses) available where you are attempting to render the exported MXS?

No I typically use a simple sketchup color. I have in the past used a sketchup material with a texture but never an MXM.
And I am doing a pack and go from the same computer it worked fine on in a test render (with render not fire) 5 minutes earlier..

That said in the past it has just not worked. ie not necessarily tied to a pack and go issue.

In the case of a simple color, there will be no dependencies involved, with the only cause I can come up with being a mismatch of material names. It should be clear, looking at the MXS in Studio, whether the material assigned is the expected one; if it's not, then I would like to see both the SKP, and the generated MXS, in order to find the reason.

Ok I will try to recreate (i revised it to a simple material for expediancy since I had to get the rendering out.)

One other niggling thing that drives me nuts is that If I have a view set up in skp with the correct view angle set up... and I make some changes to other things.. not the view angle, and then re-render I get a ridiculously wide view angle the next time I render it. If I just simply right click on the view tab and say make new scene (a copy of the other one)... the new one works fine. I have had this trouble so much (2.7 also) that I just make a habit of right clicking the tab and making a new scene before I export my mxs. But obviously would prefer not to

Obviously it should not do that, but I'm not aware of such a problem, so please let me know if you notice any kind of pattern, or a specific sequence of steps that would reproduce it. Such issues generally depend on a specific combination of several different factors, such that it's easily possible it might happen every time for a given workflow, and yet never never happen at all, for another.

I have realized I only get gray grass after a pack and go.
If I hit render directly from sketchup it works fine. If I do a pack and go... then go to that file open in render (in the same computer or a different one) and start that way I get gray grass. The strange thing is I have another group that works fine in either case.

HI Jd,

yes please check this.
I forgot to mention, but it seems the same/similar condition in the rhino plugIn.

eg. when i create a grass extension and add a material and assign it to an object, if i C&P that object into another scene, or export to block and insert it to a new scene, the material will be missing from the grass extension (primitive>Material)

thanks,
Daniel

That is something completely different, and quite easy to address. dvsone1440 is referring to something else, but I'm not clear on what it is. What I am mainly confused about is the wording of this:

If I hit render directly from sketchup it works fine. If I do a pack and go... then go to that file open in render

I don't understand the distinction, because Pack & Go is not a separate thing that you do. If it is enabled, then when you click the Render button in the plugin, the plugin a) exports an MXS, b) scans through and copies referenced files alongside that MXS, and c) starts the MXS rendering in Maxwell Render. If Pack & Go is disabled, it is the same, but with the omission of step (b).

Regardless, if you have a file where at least one grass extension is showing this behavior repeatably, it will be quickest to diagnose if you provide me that SKP, along with any specific steps I should use to reproduce the issue. The first thing will be to look in the Maxwell Render console to see if any odd messages are printed, and then to look at the scene in Studio, to see what material is actually assigned to the grass.