well – it’s the inverse actually – I’d prefer nothing local in the scenes/models.
the workflow that I’d love, is having no materials in the models – only pointers to materials in an external library. (and pointers to texture supports and image clips – yeah I wanna have my cake and eat it) modify only the library – and have the rest of the production follow. switching the renderer was just an example. but it’s more about look dev on a higher level, not one asset at a time, but a more global tweaking of all shaders for a production. Compounds and scripts for switching compounds are a workaround, for changing shaders “en masse” – but it’s not in line with the whole non-linear / non destructive nature of referencing. From: Stephen Davidson Sent: Saturday, September 20, 2014 9:35 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: external material libraries..... could this be of help? http://www.chris-g.net/2012/07/11/localise-matlib-in-softimage/ On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 2:18 PM, <pete...@skynet.be> wrote: well, that’s what you end up doing – everything is built into the model – reference it in scenes and add animation on it and override materials/shaders through the passes system. And it works fine. but it would be interesting to have materials seperated, as a reference library– eg, one eye shader, one leather, one metal shader, one wood... for all assets across a production, and tweak those in a master scene. Switch the renderer? Just go to the master scene, drop in the renderer specific shaders, export the library – all assets are updated automagically on scene load. In theory it could work like this, but in practice it’s just not reliable to be any use. From: Ognjen Vukovic Sent: Saturday, September 20, 2014 3:06 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: external material libraries..... I assume when working withn ref. models you should plan on having everything locked more or less... so baisicly to set your rig up in the model with finalized shaders and then move foreward, and avoid having to change anything latter on, names and such should be frozen in the modeling phaze, shader paramters can be changed this way in the model and it will propagate to your scenea. the rest you can manipulate with overides to avoid breaking anything.. On Friday, September 19, 2014, Jason S <jasonsta...@gmail.com> wrote: Too bad, but it's good that it's in great contrast with the rest of the referencing system :] On Friday, September 19, 2014 17:12:28, Matt Lind wrote: No. We've found trivial things such as renaming any object using a material from the referenced material library can cause all referenced materials to lose their assignments. Adding/removing an object from a referenced model using the referenced material library can trigger it too. In short, the system is too fragile to be of use in it's current state. If the bugs were fixed, it could be really useful. Matt -----Original Message----- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Jason S Sent: Friday, September 19, 2014 1:45 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: external material libraries..... I recall exporting an .xsi with a bunch of materials, importing it as a reference model, and assigning materials from that, but it wouldn't stay referenced. Even if end functionality is a bit sketchy, is there a specific process to make it work? cheers On Thursday, September 18, 2014 13:30:51, Ognjen Vukovic wrote: I reckon its safer to import them through referenced models. On Thursday, September 18, 2014, Paul Griswold <pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com <mailto:pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com>> wrote: Holy cow, talk about deja vu! I was up until 2:30 am dealing with the same issue. Are you using Mental Ray or something else? I'm using Redshift on this project. The only solution that managed to work was to merge the dysfunctional scene into a new scene, make sure the external material library had all locks removed, and then save save save save as I fixed everything. I tried some of the solutions for the old disconnected shaders bug from previous versions of XSI, but all that did was crash Softimage. Merging was the only solution. -Paul On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 5:02 AM, Rob Wuijster <r...@casema.nl <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','r...@casema.nl');>> wrote: Hi, Do people use external material libraries a lot? We tried them on a (now finished) project, but had some weird issues along the way; Objects loosing materials and rendering the default gray material, tons of non-used materials that magically appeard between sessions in scenes etc. In the end we made everything local again to fight the deadline. Any thoughts, tips on this? -- cheers! Rob Wuijster er...@casema.nl <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','r...@casema.nl');> \/-------------\/----------------\/ -- Best Regards, Stephen P. Davidson (954) 552-7956 sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke
