ShaderFX issues.
ngon master
this is a pretty annoying issue, wondering if anyone has a solution.
i had set ShaderFX to use 3 lights in my scene, and it niftily realised that those 3 lights were the ones i put in the scene myself, and in the right order too, huzzah!
but.
when i deleted one of the lights, it then went super apeshit and everything now glows as if it only has 1 light, and it's a stupid strong light. clicking undo, doesn't help.
i had set ShaderFX to use 3 lights in my scene, and it niftily realised that those 3 lights were the ones i put in the scene myself, and in the right order too, huzzah!
but.
when i deleted one of the lights, it then went super apeshit and everything now glows as if it only has 1 light, and it's a stupid strong light. clicking undo, doesn't help.
Replies
seriously though, THIS is my art community. sending people to other communities is just a stupid idea.
i love this plugin, but there seems to be a couple of hickups. like it seems to crash quite often if i try to enable shadows with 3.0 shaders.
It wasn't meant to be witty. You have a problem with the software, and if you want technical support, you should go to the website.
It isn't a community. It is a site to get help with lumonix problems. Or you can continue to post here and get random answers, and hope that Ben Cloward sees the post and gives you a real answer, who as the co-author of SFX is at the Lumonix board much more frequently than he is here.
You can also find some answers about other issues you may have with the software if you'd actually go to the forum.
EDIT: The problem may be that you are set up for 3 lights but only have 1 light, so it is using the same light 3 times (like having 3 lights in the same spot or a light with x3 intensity). If you show a screenshot it'd help.
My solution was to simply not save it when the lights go crazy and reload previous saved version. Had to go into autoback a few times as well. Not really the solution you are looking for, but a work around I guess.
till annoying though...
@professor: does that mean that all these threads for help with 3dsmax should be directed over to the autodesk forums?
get a grip.
If Autodesk were known to respond to bugs within hours or a day, provide a workaround or repro steps, and then provide a fix immediately or in a future release if no workaround can be found temporarily, yes, you should go to Autodesk. However, Autodesk does none of this, so we do what we have to. You have a very specific question and I am pointing you exactly where to go to get the quickest and most concise answer. You can also solve the problem for other users by reporting it so it can be fixed. I have no idea why this concept is so difficult for you to understand or accept. But you are free to pursue whatever fruitless avenues you'd like for help on this very simple problem, and I hope you won't stay away from Lumonix out of spite that you appear quite foolish with your hostility to the idea.
You're welcome, and good luck.
You can come over to the Lumonix forum and ask us stuff. We won't bite. I promise.
-Ben
awesome stuff btw :P
as such it's like... i felt a little affronted by someone just popping up and saying "go somewhere else with your questions plox".
Anyway - to address your issue - in the case where you make a shader that calls for 3 lights, but there are only 2 lights in the scene, what do you think the system should do? Right now ShaderFX will automatically assign lights to your shader in the order that they were created in the scene - so the first light you created goes in slot 1, second one in slot 2, etc. If you delete one that's being used, what shoud happen?
As a work around to the issue, you can manage what lights go into which slots. Select the model that you applied the shader to. Then bring up the material editor. Choose an available render ball and hit the "Get Material" button. It's the blue ball icon with the arrow pointing to it. That will pull your shader material into the material editor. Now you can adjust your shader's material parameters from here - including which lights to use in which slots.
Funny you should bring up the topic of lights. Kees and I are hard at work on the new version of ShaderFX and better light support is one of our major new features. I think you'll be pretty happy with what we've got coming.
i've found a few work arounds for the current situation. though they all call for re-applying the material in some form or other.
maybe the simplest way of doing it would have shaderFX recognise when a light is deleted, and adjust the number of lights it uses accordingly? i'm no programmer though. so i doubt it's as easy as that, or it would be done already!!!
i'll go sign up to your forum =]
Could it be adjusted so that on some form of scene update, like adding or deleting things, if a previously assigned light is no longer found, or if there are fewer lights in the scene than the shader is expecting, that the now orphaned light could be set to some dummy values for rendering purposes? like set its color intensity and position to zero, so as far as the shader is concerned the light is still "there" it just has no effect on the scene.