Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Question about organizing and sharing materials library... I've got 3 machines on which I use Maxwell; 2 on the same network and 1 remote. The more I use Maxwell the more my materials libraries have gotten out of control. For my networked machines I have my materials library on a file server, but I can't get to it from my remote machine. Consequently I find myself moving materials back and forth on a jump drive or downloading materials twice just to keep the libraries in sync. A pain. I was wondering, does anyone use Dropbox for their materials library? Any other solutions? Thanks.

Eric

I use dropbox for pretty much everything, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for materials unless you've got a pay account with lots of storage. Sooner or later (probably sooner) you'll run through your 2-3 gigs of storage so you'll just be putting off the inevitable.

I recommend getting a good external hard drive and a good syncing program. Primarily, the idea is to get something big enough for ALL of your textures - you don't want to be mucking around with copying and pasting certain ones, or having to pick which folders to sync up. Ideally, you'll even get something large enough to put all your libraries on, not just maxwell materials but all your 2d textures, 3d models, etc. At that point use something like puresync to automagically sync up your folders.

For example, with puresync, you'll select all the folders you'll want to sync up and set it to sync whenever you plug in your external hard drive. From then on, every time you plug it in, puresync will get you all synced up without you worrying about it. You can even set it up to sync both ways so if you download a material while your on your remote machine, the next time you plug in your drive, it will recognize that you downloaded that and upload it to the server. Pretty sweet.

-Brodie

Hey Guys,

I also use dropbox for absolutely everything (with a paid account), but I'm looking for a better way to share materials between two PCs and a Mac. That's where I've run into problems. The differing file structure makes it (seemingly) impossible to get perfect syncing. When I open one material on the PC side in MXED, the material maps locations are set to the PC dropbox path (see below), but then that throws off the usefulness of the Mac side, and vice versa. Does anybody know if there's a good way to sync materials and textures cross-platform?

Windows: C:\Users\Name\Dropbox
OS X: Macintosh HD/User/Name/Dropbox

I've sent Next Limit some questions about their recommendation on the proper way to set up materials for this, but that was about a month ago with no response

Thanks,

Matt

Hello All,
I would recommend using an in-house NAS server and setting up a mapped drive to store your resources (3d model library, textures, etc...). Therefore every networked computer calls the same location on the mapped drive (eg.; Z/Brick/Redbrick05.jpg etc etc). This setup may now be too simple for a larger studio (not sure, we are just 3 people).
We use a Brontastor from Armari which I am told fully supports Windows, MAC, Linux and UNIX .
We used to have the mapped drives located on a workstation but now (we only got the Brontastor last month) we have a lot more storage (6TB) and it means that any computer on the network can have access to the full project library (mapped N drive) and our resource library (mapped Z drive). Also the NAS server is very low on power which is important as we need it on 24/7 for network rendering. There are of course a few extra bonuses in that we are not relying on external services, internet download speeds, and security/confidentiality -we have everything stored within our company (although this is not that important in our industry).

I think we'll get about 2 years out of this setup, at which stage I would expect we move the project library to a 2nd (probably larger) new NAS server and use the existing 6tb one for our resource library only, so for us it's got all the expansion capability we need.

Finally, obviously it's key that everyone is briefed and fully understands how the project & resource library are setup (eg, we use a folder called "project specific" within the textures library. Only if a new texture is judged to be relevant to general projects do we copy it to the general subfolders, as we are also wary that you can have too many textures to choose from which slows the workflow also.)
I hope this helps

Jesper

pogoplug works for me

pogoplug.com

Hey everybody,

I figured out the dropbox setup if anybody else uses it. I chose to store all my mxms in a folder (with subfolders by material category), and all of the related textures are stored in a single (and huge) folder, with the names of the textures that relate back to the material name.

So I changed the second material path in Mxed, Studio, and Maxwell to the location of the textures folder in Dropbox on each machine. This let me keep all of my materials up to date across any set of machines, cross platform. The only real requirement is that all of the textures have to be in the same root folder, if they're not, it doesn't work. I simply renamed all of the textures for each material to correspond with their associated mxm, so they're easy to find should I ever need to relink/alter. I say "simply", but it was a pretty big undertaking to rename all the textures, although, now that I have the system set up, it's easy to maintain and use.

So far it's working well for me.

Matt