Material editor bitmap problems

[gaborkukedi]

Hello,

 

I have a problem with the material editor displaying certain bitmaps. If I pull in some materials to the material editor, in most cases it works fine, you can see the bitmap nicely in the preview window. However, if I load certain other bitmaps in the diffuse map slot, only a black sphere remains with some reflections. I am using max 2012 with vray, and my first guess was that the render engine causes the problem, but mental ray has the same glitch. Then I thought, maybe the size of the bitmap is too large, so I checked some sizes. I had no problem displaying 7 MB size jpgs, and at the same time, couldn't load 70kb ones correctly. When it turns to rendering, sometimes there's no problem, but most of the cases only black objects appear. So far I'm out of ideas. Has anyone met something like this? I'd appreciate any hints.

 

Thanks.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

The images that aren't working are JPEGs? A long long time ago I used to keep a copy of Paintshop Pro around (even though at that time it had, I believe, zero painting features) because it was the best at opening any JPEG of the available software. In short - JPEGs used to be poorly implemented in software. That was 20 years ago. In short - MAYBE you have some JPEGs that are saved by something that does something weird; like Bob's Free Paint 2000, or whatever. Open and save them from something else, like Photoshop or your favourite thumbnailer.

 

Maybe they are in a subformat that Max doesn't understand. For instance, a JPEG can be grayscale only. I think there are options on sub-sampling various channels mumble 2:2:1 mumble something forget mumble. There is JPEG2000, I don't know if it saves to a .JPG extension or not (I'd hope it didn't...). MAYBE max doesn't understand some long ignored JPEG option that you ended up using. Open and save from a different program; preferably one that is not likely to remember the original JPEG settings; heck, save them to BMP, open the BMP, save that as a new JPEG.

 

Best guesses for now, and they're kinda weak, sorry.

[gaborkukedi]

I tried to convert the problematic bitmaps int other formats, but that didn't help to solve the problem. Also, what is strange is the fact, that my bitmaps came from the same "family", some members of which are working, others are not. I have no idea, how to cope with it.