03-31-2020, 07:04 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-02-2020, 07:23 AM by Emor D'ni Lap.)
I finally tried the obvious test - which is what I should have done originally ( 
)
Open a fresh clean start of Max, and create a new Plasma Standard material.
Sure enough, not one but two [Entire Animation] helper nodes are instantly created:
I thought... these must represent one for each of the two default Plasma Layers in the material?
Just to test, I set the base layer to a solid texture and the top layer to an alphaed texture, applied it to a cube, then rendered.
Then I deleted each of the [Entire Animation] nodes, one by one. Even after both were deleted, the cube rendered normally:
Okay, we're still not understanding why the plug-in is assuming there must be animation nodes automatically assigned to Plasma layers!
No doubt that it has to do with this inclusion in each Plasma material; I wish it were an option that could be set somewhere, rather than being mandatory:
But my takeaway at this point is that if you want to delete these (cough) "helpers" on Plasma materials, do it when you create the material. Otherwise, later on when you have Plasma materials that actually do have animation on them, you won't be able to delete your static, non-animated material nodes because you won't be able to identify them: the plug-in doesn't associate the helper node with the Material name in any helpful way!
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Again, this is usually not a big deal, and I've never even paid attention to it in the past because I'd never worked with a project that had so many assigned materials before. It's mostly a mystery to me.
I would guess though that these nodes have to be adding some marginal number of bytes to the Max file. But I have no idea whether the nodes also are carried through export to the .prp files... probably not?
)Open a fresh clean start of Max, and create a new Plasma Standard material.
Sure enough, not one but two [Entire Animation] helper nodes are instantly created:
I thought... these must represent one for each of the two default Plasma Layers in the material?
Just to test, I set the base layer to a solid texture and the top layer to an alphaed texture, applied it to a cube, then rendered.
Then I deleted each of the [Entire Animation] nodes, one by one. Even after both were deleted, the cube rendered normally:
Okay, we're still not understanding why the plug-in is assuming there must be animation nodes automatically assigned to Plasma layers!
No doubt that it has to do with this inclusion in each Plasma material; I wish it were an option that could be set somewhere, rather than being mandatory:
But my takeaway at this point is that if you want to delete these (cough) "helpers" on Plasma materials, do it when you create the material. Otherwise, later on when you have Plasma materials that actually do have animation on them, you won't be able to delete your static, non-animated material nodes because you won't be able to identify them: the plug-in doesn't associate the helper node with the Material name in any helpful way!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Again, this is usually not a big deal, and I've never even paid attention to it in the past because I'd never worked with a project that had so many assigned materials before. It's mostly a mystery to me.
I would guess though that these nodes have to be adding some marginal number of bytes to the Max file. But I have no idea whether the nodes also are carried through export to the .prp files... probably not?