Managing texture maps across multiple platforms

[David Lemelin]

I have recently begun porting my FormZ work from my beloved (if underpowered) Mac to a more robust PC Workstation. In the process of working out bugs, and when I'm on the road, I still do lots of modeling work on my Mac. However, I'm running up against an annoying issue with texture maps losing their link when I move to the PC station.

 

I keep all my live documents and 3D resources in a DropBox account which keeps all my computers synced and my work available where ever I go. So when I open model "x" it is always from the DropBox location which also contains all the related texture maps. Even MXM textures live in a folder on that remote drive. However, when I try to render my work, I get constant error messages about missing links... The really weird thing is that it's not uniform. Some textures go missing while others are still there. 

 

To add insult to injury, Maxwell Fire, which I use as a flight check for my final renders, lists missing textures or texture components... one. at. a. time. Meaning I have to cycle through starting Fire, then opening the log to find which texture is causing the render to fail, then relink that texture, then start all over again. Wash, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat.

 

So two points; 

 

a) has anyone come up on this and found a solution to keep texture linked to the model across stations? 

 

would it be conceivable for Maxwell to perform a complete flight check of all dependencies before writing the log?

 

[pylon]

Hi David,

 

Manual re-linking with the Maxwell Plugin should almost never be necessary. Use the plugin's Resource Manager to specify folders on disk to search for any missing dependencies.

http://support.nextlimit.com/display/maxwell4/formZ+%7C+Resource+Manager