[dvsone1440]

I have been having a lot of material issues in since going to 3. In particular a material will look correct in fire and then not render the same in Render. Additionally I have had a material render correctly in Render, then switch the rendering to a new machine and materials are off. My colleague has even had an emitter material render fine in Fire and then not render in Render?

[JDHill]

a material will look correct in fire and then not render the same in Render.

What type of changes are we talking about, a red material becoming blue, a shiny one becoming rough, the tiling of a texture changing?

I have had a material render correctly in Render, then switch the rendering to a new machine and materials are off.

What is being switched to the new machine, the SKP file, or an MXS, with the external files they reference? Also, I'm not clear on what it means for materials to be "off." Were a red material to be rendered as pink, I might say it was "off," or I might say that a light which had previously been on, is now (switched) off. At any rate, the first thing I'd do would be to look at the MXS to try to find something that had changed, and in the Maxwell Render console, in order to see if a different version of a referenced file was perhaps being found in the process of fixing up invalid paths.

My colleague has even had an emitter material render fine in Fire and then not render in Render?

If you have a set of steps by which I can reproduce the behavior here, or file that demonstrates it, I'd like to take a look.

[dvsone1440]

I am using an mxm and it is light yellow in my fire window and then grey when I subsequently hit the Render button. The other properties come through.. texture etc..

I have started a rendering (using Render not fire or studio) on one machine, then stopped it and resumed it on another (also using render)... both looking at the same materials folder. When I resume it on the second machine it is different.

I will try to get him to put together a dropbox folder of his files with the emitter problem.

[JDHill]

If you provide this light yellow MXM, with its textures (and .ior files, and whatever else it may use), I can take a look and see what seems to be happening with it. Regarding a render looking different after resuming, I can try and take a guess if you post screenshots, but it would really only be a guess, since that is not a plugin-related question.

[JDHill]

There's more to the story with this MXM, which works fine here, but I can't say what it is. The material's color comes from a PNG texture assigned to Reflectance 0 & 90 of the sole BSDF in its "base" layer. The only way I can think to make it render like the image you uploaded is for a different texture named stonework-040_d100.png to be found when the MXS is being rendered.

The material does also use a stonework-040_s100-g050-r.png in the Reflectance 0 & 90 textures of the sole BSDF in its "shine" layer, which is a greyscale image, that when copied into those slots in the "base" bsdf results in a grey material vaguely similar to what the render shows, but there is too dark a shadow around the block seams to call it a match.

I would take a close look at the console in Maxwell Render, and then at the textures found at the paths it is actually using when it renders. If I didn't find any discrepancy, then I'd inspect the actual MXM files that are being rendered.

Just as a side comment, I'd also look at using some reduced-resolution versions of these textures; at 9600x3700 pixels, the diffuse texture alone takes over 100MB in memory (it is the same for any texture of that size, regardless if it compresses on disk to 50MB, 15MB, or 1KB ). There's nothing to gain by using such large textures in a context like this, but lots to lose, in terms of waiting for them to load while working, and of pushing them over networks. Regardless if you avoid loading these textures into SketchUp's material, remember that they do have to be loaded by Maxwell if you render the model in FIRE; with memory capacity already constrained, it is a bit expensive to be using MXM files that cost nearly half a GB apiece.

I'm going to take a look at your colleague's scene now.

[dvsone1440]

So I just Created a new material then applied the same mxm and it worked fine both in fire and render?

Re: textures those are arroway textures. I have never really noticed a noticed a big problem using them in Render... maybe they were causing the material change from one computer to the next going over the network to get them? I have hundreds of those textures so it would take me forever to go and resize every file but I guess that is why I have trouble in Fire often. To the point where I don't really use it much.

[JDHill]

I was not saying that the texture size would have anything to do with the problems mentioned in this thread, but more just mentioning it for the sake of your convenience in working. And you wouldn't need to open and resize every image individually, there are lots of programs that can do that in a batch, converting/resizing entire directories full of images (here's one that I've used before).

As far as creating a new material, importing an MXM, and seeing no problem, that's exactly what I see here, and it suggests that where you are actually rendering the MXS, Maxwell is finding other textures or MXM files. I noticed that in the upload for your colleague's scene, most of the textures are uploaded twice: once in the folder next to the MXS, and another time in a /textures subfolder. Besides being unnecessary, that's a recipe for trouble, since Maxwell will search in both of those locations (it is not defined, whether one or the other would be first to be searched) to find missing files.

[dvsone1440]

Understood and yes... that makes sense. thanks

I am not sure I understand this comment. I do see that he put the textures in a file with the Maxwell file + the textures... but that is not the way we normally work. I would expect to only see the textures folder there. I am not sure why he did that so I will ask him.

[JDHill]

Okay, it is good if you normally just have:

Code: Select all

  - scene.mxs
  + textures
    - texture.jpg
    - material.mxm
    - environment.hdr
    - etc