[big K]

hello everybody,
i just want to start a little discussion on this topic because i have found different views about it.

this is from the cinema4d plugin:

> SUPPORT OF PROCEDURAL TEXTURES OF CINEMA4D

When using native C4D materials, there is a basic support of procedural textures which can be mixed with the channel's color. This mix is saved to a file as a bitmap and applied like a normal texture to the resulting Maxwell material in the desired channel. This works for MaxwellClassic tags and when using native Cinema4D materials alone. The resulting bitmaps have a customizable size, which can be found in the Engine tab of the Cinemaxwell dialog. Some procedurals "behave" better than others, that is, the saved texture looks more like what is shown in
the Cinema4D viewport than to what would be shown in a Cinema4D render. Obviously, the sampling size also has its effect on the quality of the result. Beware of umlauts, accents, carets and other strange characters in object names, they don't translate into good texture names and can cause procedural textures not to work (because they are not saved).

the development team of the 3dmax and maya plugin can be quoted as follows:

We did not do this because an automatic conversion could be very dangerous because you could end up having hundreds or more bitmaps on your hard disk... not to think of situations where you would have animated procedurals.

I have an old Greek theater scene where I used hundreds of instances to populate with stones and a procedural shader for them.

So I would end up having the same number of bitmaps on the hdd.

So better let's wait a bit more for maxwell to support procedurals the right way.

i have tested a medium scene with some cinema textures and there they were. quite a lot of generated bitmaps in the working folder. even blank colors are generated as bitmaps (this maybe is a little overdone as this information maybe passed to maxwell another way)
well in my opinion it would be at least a good solution to turn it on or off. and a special "extra temp bitmap" folder for all those maps would be a good idea.

what do you think about it?
michael

[Boris Ulzibat]

Why not have a lot of bitmaps?
Maxwell will loose only preloading scene speed, nothing more, and you can always do each render in a separate folder (I always do it).

[Rochr]

It´s not like Maxwell doesn´t generate a lot of other files as it is now. I have like 30 GB´s of unecessary MXS-files all over my harddrive. A few hundred bitmaps seem like a small problem in comparison.