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MaxtoA Material Preview still not working in Activeshade?

4 REPLIES 4
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Message 1 of 5
ben.oconnorA5W9K
205 Views, 4 Replies

MaxtoA Material Preview still not working in Activeshade?

Hi,

I was hoping to find out if there is a time frame to have the Material Preview thumbnail show the result of the updates to the material rather than relying on seeing the changes in the Activeshade window?

Cheers

4 REPLIES 4
Message 2 of 5
madsd
in reply to: ben.oconnorA5W9K

If you use OSL nodes you will get thumbnails in more cases than using the Arnold c++ nodes, and their feature sets are identical or virtually identical in almoste all cases.

All special blends, and tricks will print to the thumbnails through OSL, not Arnold nodes, and it will remain like that, since OSL is the new standard.

OSL crushes any other initiative by orders of magnitudes in performance in the viewport when previewing procedurals as well. We can build super complex procedurals that run 100fps light as a feather in viewport.

Message 3 of 5

I appreciate your response Mads.

I am wondering though if this will ever work as it should, again? If I place a default bitmap node onto a Arnold Standard Surface shader I expect it to be displayed in the material editor when I am using ActiveShade and not disappear with a setting change.

If you are building a lot of materials on a high res model this also becomes a tedious process especially if you have to close and re-open active shade.

I also found that I had very much the same experience with the OSL maps where the preview disappears after several changes.

I was hoping that it was your aim for this to be resolved as I keep checking the release notes with no end in sight to this annoying issue.

Thanks for your time.
Message 4 of 5
madsd
in reply to: ben.oconnorA5W9K

I've personally timed and tested workflow speeds, Active shade against Thumbnails, I always win in speed using active shade.

Let active shade window be open constantly, its not slowing down the application, so there is no need to open and close it if you sit and work with assets that needs to be shaded.

Thumbnail is also much slower to update, Active shade is instant, Thumbnails needs to update through whole chain if you build advanced shaders, it can never win in speed. I have it off, closed down, and disabled thumbnails for best performance when working with Arnold.


Message 5 of 5
madsd
in reply to: madsd

The thumbnails is coded in a bad way Ben, there is no way around it, Arnold takes the thumbnails out of play as you observe, this is not the right path to go, so something fundamental has to happen, but that wont be fixing the current situation, its doing something completly different, that could lead to some kind of thumbnail preview.

I'd suggest you to make a post on the ideas pages, its been up for debate several times but its not just a simple fix, and it has to be done proper.

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