ezmerel2 wrote:
"most likely"?
what sort of research have you done to make this assertion sir?
I have "researched" the Max SDK and noticed that it has a bug (or limitation, whatever you want to call it) in that it reports those objects as being instances, when in fact they aren't. I looked at what mental ray does (which is integrated into Max by Autodesk), and saw that it exports those objects as real geometry. I barely touched Vray a few times in my life, but as far as I recall, Vray doesn't treat Max instances as render instances at all, you have to use its special proxy objects to get instancing (correct me if I'm wrong). I have no idea what Fry does, but if you know, please tell me.
We've looked into detecting when Max lies, that is, when objects say that they are instances but actually aren't. We couldn't find an easy way; we're not Autodesk and we don't have the source code to Max, which makes some things slightly less trivial than it was for them when they integrated mental ray. However, we didn't invest too much time into it, since all you have to do to fix it is uncheck "use instancing" in the renderer options. There have been more important matters to take care of than this; things which can't be fixed with a simple checkbox, and which would have generated much bigger problems and complaints if they weren't addressed.
We can change the default of "use instancing" to off. We can even add a plug-in option where you can pick the default for that flag in newly created scenes, so that people who use Revit geometry a lot don't have to bother unchecking the box every time they make a scene. It just never occurred to me that it's so important that it can prevent people from upgrading to Maxwell 2.
If I had all the time and resources in the world, I'd make sure no checkboxes have to be touched unless absolutely necessary; if the plug-in can detect something automatically, it should do so, not require the user to set it up. However, I don't have unlimited time and resources, so I'd rather add, say, realtime preview for color correction in the viewport than worry about a checkbox.
When I said it will never be fixed, I meant those things will never render as instances. When we have time, we'll make another attempt at auto-detecting bogus instances. If we figure it out and it doesn't require 15 hacks and 3 months of development time to implement it, we'll release a plug-in update so you won't have to uncheck the box by hand anymore, and I won't have to document my sub-par research efforts in public.
- By Mark Bell
- By Matteo Villa