[kami]

Hi JD
I got very often problems when refreshing material previews. When I got one or two renders running in the background, the material preview cannot be refreshed. No matter how long I wait after clicking the refresh icon.
Do you have any idea what could be causing this? Is there anything I could do?

cheers, christop
(I'm working on rhino 5)

[JDHill]

I'm not aware of anything that should cause a problem like this. Is it totally random, or can you think of any other known factors that might help me to duplicate it here?

[kami]

It is really hard to tell ... sometimes it helps if I close the material editor (inside rhino) and open it again. Sometimes I have to close rhino completely.
and I think the more (and bigger) textures a material uses, the smaller the chances get, that a refresh works (which sound kind of naturally)

the weird thing is that it works perfectly on another machine I got (running rhino4 there). I'll try rhino4 on this one here as well ...

[JDHill]

I really, really don't see where the version of Rhino would make a difference; the plugin has no knowledge of which version it is running under. To refresh the preview, the plugin uses standard methods to write an mxs file and start maxwell.exe -- it's nearly the same as when you hit the Render button. That's why this is a strange problem. If you can find a trigger though, or certain conditions necessary for it to show up, I'd be happy to try to fix it.

[kami]

Hmm, that makes sense ... I noticed when I got one rendering running and start a secon one, it sometimes takes about 10 minutes just to preload its data (not even voxeling).
Could be a network problem ...

[polynurb]

kami if it gets stuck you could try to kill maxwell.exe via task manager.. if there is one that should not be there.. i mean don't kill your running renders