Saturday, January 26, 2008

Arch & Design shaders

Tips from Jamie Cardoso #4: Arch & Design shaders

I normally use customized materials, but for those who use default arch & design materials:

When applying shaders such as satin varnished wood shader and etc, one should be careful when network rendering. The satin varnished wood shader normally generates temporary bitmap/s( IE finishes.flooring.wood.plank.beech.jpg) in a localdrive. When sending the 3ds max to net render across another machine/s, the other machine/s may not have this file, which will subsequently generate errors in backburner. Even the backburner's include maps. function doesn't work at times.

The most reliable way of re-pathing any missing maps is to first use the archive tool to archive the file (IE file + archive..). This tool will also collect all the maps in your 3ds max scene. Thereafter one should use the asset tracking tool to re-direct all the missing files to the area where your archived files are. If there are any unused paths in the asset tracking dialog, simply strip them with strip path tool. Do not use the the include maps function from backburner.

By the way, to configure paths with the asset tracking, simply select any path from the asset tracking dialog box list, and right click. A pop up menu should appear. One can choose to either browse... or strip from the pop up menu. When browsing for a file, ensure that the map is found, selected and opened...or it won't reconfigure the path on the asset tracking. To access the asset tracking tool, simply go to file, on the drop down list, choose asset tracking.

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