Groups broken in library

[SeanRedmond]

Hello,

I just updated a bunch of styles to use groups... only to find they are broken if loaded through the library. I would imagine its because nothing is embedded in the group and you can't extract them. Is this a known issue?

Thanks!

[Michal Karmazín]

Hi,

I’m afraid, that’s the current limitation: “Groups cannot be 'embedded' within the RC object. When a Group is deleted from scene, it's removed from RailClone as well.“

Best regards,

[nubo]

Hi,

Are you guys planning on fixing this limitation or is it not doable at all?
I'm currently working on a library preset involving a lot of different light sources which means utilising a lot of groups.
The more the groups used the more the chance that someone will delete some of them from scene by accident causing the preset to break.

Best regards,
Przemek

[Michal Karmazín]

To embed objects, we use a trick, but with Groups, we can't bypass this limit due to how 3ds Max handles them (not as objects). Let me mention that another option would be to use the VRayLightMtl (or another "light material" depending on your render engine) for these purposes. This way, you can also take advantage of the RailClone Color map linked to the Light color map of that material. It can work in several Blending modes, which you might find very useful to adjust the final look. I hope that helps.

Best regards,

[nubo]

Thanks Michal,

Yes, I'm aware of the option to use LightMaterial, but since we want to be able to incorporate the powerful Vray LightMix workflow it becomes impossible to use LightMaterials this way, because it either creates hundreds LightMix layers (one for every luminous material) quickly caping the limit of 64 layers for LightMix, or it merges them all in one big layer which is useless in post editing.

Ehh, if there only was some other 3dsmax container type suitable for the job... 
Let's hope in future vray versions there'll more flexible solution for LightMaterials in LightMix.

Anyway, thanks for the info and best regards.

Przemek