CliveG

I'm sorry Taro.... you've got to get with the real world. Plagiarism is everywhere,you plagiarise too, just perhaps don't realise it. Maybe the ancient Romans could sue you for stealing their unique exterior concept of lintels...? Your unique and apparently valuable concepts will have come from your own interpretation and modification and adaption of other peoples concepts. That is what architectural design is.... it's all just ongoing conceptual development and standing on the shoulders of other designers back through the ages. As seemingly unique as the design concepts of Gaudi or Frank Gehry are, do you think there is any legal mechanism where they can say that this squiggle is mine and mine only and if another architect produces a similar squiggle I can sue? All anybody has to do is change a detail here and there and they can claim one of your concepts (or one of Antonio's or Frank's) as their own. I think your dreaming....

So where would Normal mapping fit in with this sort of application then?

No the mapping is fine.... it's your hex maps that are jacked . You have the grey areas angled at 45 degrees when they need to be angled in 30 degree increments instead. Once you correct that and make sure you have unticked all of the randomisers in the Floor Generator UUV settings tab..... it works fine. Or do what Corey says.. though if it was a large area you might like the random gamma and saturation controls that the FG / Multi-map route affords. Hope it helps.

Thanks Thomas.

It might be too early to say for sure, but I may just stick with the Outliner script above.... it seems to have some handy features and could be all that I need..... assuming it's reliable. I'll give it the torture test

Cheers.... umm What'll it do? James: I'm on '17 and was all service packed up to date about 5 months ago.... I'll check those are up to date tomorrow. I suspect that the error comes about from the Xref Scene workflow as I often have to reload the Xrefs after isolating items and then ending that isolation - this often just drops the xref or causes issues with the layering current within the xref.

I had saved out a couple of thousand corona proxy ceiling tiles and lights and used xref scene to have them render without getting in the way in my scene. But I had to make a change to the ceiling, so quickly "removed" that as an xref and brought them all back in to make the change in situ... but when they merged back in to the original model all of my layers had gone. I can't see how that should have happened, I've done it before many times but how does any glitch happen..... voodoo But it was that I couldn't merge everything into a fresh scene and resolve it that concerned me. The layer explorer has been weird since. I should point out that I had followed instructions on some thread that had the layer explorer sort of mimic the old layer dialog from the early versions (without the old functionality... it was still the 2017 scene explorer fundamentals just set up like 2013) - Of course now I can't recall what I did or find the thread again..... Mmmm it shouldn't be this hard to manage layers, but between me and Max.........

I'm not sure that this is so as the rename option was greyed out entirely so I couldn't rename it from the default layer name assigned by Max. Though I think the catalyst for the problem was probably the dreaded Xref Scene. I know I shouldn't have tried it.... but I like Xref's. Possibly a throwback to decades of using them in AutoCAD

No, for me it is 100% a matter of reliability. I was putting up with the scene explorer workflow even though it did a bad job... because it did a bad job RELIABLY. I could factor that into my workflow. As soon as that reliability went out of the window and it's now acting flaky and compromising my ability to hit deadlines then it is no longer tolerable. Reliability is an absolute necessity and priority.

Thanks guys, I'll try outliner.... hell I'd try voodoo and probably be better off than this torture. Huge project (for me) it lost all of my layers, everything still showed the individual layer name in object properties but the layers didn't exist as far as that piece of junk layer manager was concerned - it showed layer 0 only and no heirachy. Merging in to a fresh file didn't work and then when eventually I went piece by sodding piece and put them on new layers.... it wouldn't let me rename those layers, so I have to know Layer001 = Ceiling etc. Really I'm with Juraj on quitting the layer workflow, but what else is there.... bloody Xrefs don't work either! How can you organise a big project easily?

James' advice is sound... I'd go further and say that a lot of pay tutorials are not worth your hard earned money. Some are actually just taking the Pee (Not mentioning any names ...... Grant Warwick) and most are outdated already, outpaced by the development of the renderers. Study photographs, learn to really look at the sort of things you want to replicate and then to look at the work you produce and be thoroughly critical of it. It's more about learning to look, than learning some technical gumpf. Especially these days as the render engines are just so damn good. Good luck.

In the name of all that's holy and good.... can somebody please script a better Max Layer manager than the abject junk "Layer Explorer" merde of an excuse for a tool that we're given in recent versions. A cursory search for information / inspiration on the subject shows there's a lot of people feel the same way. How they could have gone backwards from the simple and useable early versions of this tool to the sorry state of affairs we find now probably speaks volumes about AD. It's something I'd happily purchase.... the stress reduction alone would make it worthwhile!

Discussing clichès isn't necessarily ridiculing the work, I assume most here are professionals and are producing work for customers that have creative expectations... often those creative expectations are the issue, not the technician producing them. "Home in the Forest....?" You really think so? OK... Ummm your stuff looks pretty good , but generally I look to Juraj and Veronika as to what I'd like to be producing. Both your portfolio's seem grounded in a reality I can generally relate to though. However I don't think it's up to us to determine the stand-out Archviz standards, it's for our clients and customers. Sometimes as Juraj admits we can get a bit too close to the technical aspects of a vizualisation and want to show a material or asset off, or put a crease in a floor rug when it might be to the detriment of what our clients actually seek. I've never had a client ask me to crease a floor rug My favourite too.... I fully design the projects I vizualise so I have far more creative input than most and yet I know I'm nothing close to an "artist"... creative ? yes.... Artist...? No. Not even close But that's just me of course.

I'm going to add to the clichès with the current interior favourites: Creases and wrinkles in floor rugs (because without them it just looks like a 2d plane with bad hair and fur) Random bits of cloth draped over chairs (who has odd bits of cloth draped over their furniture in their penthouse suite?) even a sheepskin FFS? Framed artwork leant against walls (because we thought we'd show off an unfinished decoration job) I don't think I've seen a property in 100 countries over 50 years that has paintings leant on the walls. Piles of books on the floor (because we read so many books at once these days but don't have bookshelves) We're all apparently trying to tell a story with our scenes, the story these things suggest to me is just "CGI" ! Did I miss anything....?

You're both right or both wrong.... there's no "one size fit's all" to describe Architecture, but there is is (pretty much) to describe human nature, it's people that drive these things and people will try to take advantage of you to further their own ends (getting their work done in record time, perhaps), not whether it's architecture or town planning or landscape design or product visualisation or.... So my advise is more to set out as you mean to continue, if you're prepared to work long hours and weekends at the outset, then don't think that's going to miraculously change later on unless you can somehow re-invent your business and your clients, those clients are going to expect you to continue to work long hours and weekends as your business develops. Why wouldn't they? This is the business model they've bought into and you can understand why they'd expect this to continue. If you feel you must put in the extra time because your fresh in the field and trying to develop customers then perhaps try to divide your work time into 9-5 weekdays strictly for the client and the extra time in developing you and your skills and your libraries etc, so the client sees the benefit indirectly and doesn't develop unreasonable expectations that will continue through your working relationship. Obviously there are different strands of Architecture, the area I'm in is much more time pressured side of the business than perhaps some of the top end clients of Juraj & Veronika who - from what I can see - are also in a much more powerful position in the client / Visualiser relationship. So most of us are going to encounter different problems with our client relationships than they are. For example I'd guess they are less concerned that their clients might walk away if J & V want to have the weekend off than many of us here would be