3dsmax xref question

Monophobe

Hi all,

Does anyone know if it's possible to xref an object using a multi/sub material? So far I've had no success and the first material in the multi/sub just gets applied to all IDs.

Thanks

Mark Dygert

xrefs... hold on, I kinda threw up a little thinking about them again.

Is there any particular reason you really need to use xrefs? I've had nothing but problems with them every time I tried to use them, things would work long enough to lure me in but then something would inventively go off the rails.

• Perfectly good links, breaking. Resulting in a scene full of little x's. This happened with materials links too.
• Nightmare management tools, it didn't make it easy to fix whatever was broken and it broke often.
• I started to have a lot of problems with xref's bigger than 150-200mb.
• It didn't play very well with a render farm, at times it would be fine and things would render ok, at other times everything had to be collapsed into one scene and then sent off.

But then again, the last time I used them was just after the supposedly "redid" the system in 2008-09. Shortly after that they came out with "containers" which are a lot more reliable. They can be a bit slow and awkward to manage, depending on what you're doing, BUT... still better than xrefs. So if you haven't explored containers, you should probably look into them.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1Inl-wHzGU"]3dsMax: Containers pt.1 Scene Managment - YouTube[/ame]