hi,
some things i came across:
i have a little issue with rendering the material previews.
they start to update, but at SL1 the image freezes, and then only shows the preview at final SL.
this happens 95% , sometimes it shows the entire process.
my specs:win Xp64 / intel 975x/qx6700/8gb/quadro fx4800 / two screens
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something else i have been wondering about regarding FIRE and material previews, concerning the load times of textures:
i work (need to) over the network, hardware is quite decent, server and switch wise, and i get good speeds of ~30-50mb/s when i copy files or save/open documents. But ever since, i see a behaviour with maxwell, that when the software loads textures over the network, the speed is crawling at maybe 5% saturation.
This is really annoying, because IBL files and/or textures sometimes take minutes to load. for material previews that is a real issue and the same goes for FIRE.
also I noticed that three might be another issue than
this with using IBL, which is that sometimes even when turning IBL off again the texture is still being loaded to FIRE, but not used in the calculation. I noticed the same when rendering to the network, after turning IBL off again; the dependency was still listed in the monitor console.
in a way, i'd wish textures could be cached ; i think studio does that.
a textures list window, like studio would be great too, it could also show if a texture needs update (like a block manager) and show the option to cache it locally.
it'd be easy if there was a "force flag" on using the textures in the alternative path. but if double the original location is used. there should be an option "override all found", then an alternative folder could be created locally which the plugIn specifies for rendering locally, but doesn't when rendering out mxs (for network).
this somehow connects to my old wish to have a low/mid/highres switch textures.
when caching locally.. the local version cloud be resized.
basically a draft mode for previewing.
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the extract & assign material function fails sometimes not assigning the material to the geometry;
and occasionally, but this is an old and rare bug (so i never reported as hard to retrace) i end up with an "inverted proxy image" in a texture but it is not visible in any slot, and i can't get rid off it. it is then hidden in the scene, and even if i replace any texture, it will still be looked for in the dependencies. which is a network killer, as these files are on c:. so i have to dive in there and copy them to a network path, and define it as alternate texture path.
thanks!
daniel