Problem with IFL's?

[tmccarter]

Hey everyone,

 

Has anyone had any problems with too many IFL materials in one scene? I'm working on a residential street scene animation that requires a fair amount of people to make it look un-ghost-town-like. Right now I've got 23 materials with IFL's of moving people in the diffuse and opacity map slots. I can add as many jpg and tga and tif and hdr materials as I like, but if I add one more material with an IFL, I get a "Cannot Save Properties" error when I save the file. Now, everything seems to work OK even after getting the error, and I haven't encountered any probs rendering (yet) but this is a big project, and I don't want to run into surprises when the whole thing's done and ready to render.

 

So, long question short: 1.) Has anyone else seen this file properties error, and 2.) Has anyone else had problems with a bunch o' IFL materials in their scene?

 

Oh, and I'm running 3ds Max 7, VRay Avdanced 1.47.03

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Tim McCarter

[Scott Schroeder]

Yes, it's a Max based error. I get it all the time with our card people's IFL's as well. Though I have a really hard time replicating the error as I once thought that maybe it was just a corrupt person file, but the error seems totally random.

 

From what I have seen, I have not experienced any negatives with that error. Someone once told me that it has to do with some old file properties and they do not adversely affect your scene.

 

I bet if you did some digging in the max forums you'd find a better reason than my half-assed attempt.

 

So for now, I'd just ignore those errors unless you've seen something different.

[tmccarter]

Thanks Scott. I'll look around and see what else I can find. At least now I know I'm not the only one who's seen this error. I'll post my findings back here.

 

By the way, (completely off topic) how do you like it down there at Focus 360?

 

Thanks again,

 

-Tim

[tmccarter]

Just a heads up, I found the reason for the error. In the File > File Properties command, there is a list of all "dependencies" in the scene. Max saves this list as part of the file. Now, if you use IFL's, you'll notice that every image in the IFL is listed there - which can be hundreds per IFL. If you have 30 sprites in your scene, each with an IFL (or two if you have opacity mapped) that references 300 jpeg images, it can add up pretty quickly. I went back and trimmed up my IFL files, removing all the lines I didn't need. In some files there were hundreds of extra lines that were never seen. This decreased my file's dependencies and the error stopped. Just a FYI. Peace out.