Plasma Materials create 'Entire Animation' helper!

[Emor D'ni Lap]

Helping a friend with an ongoing project, I find their .max file is loaded with many hundreds of helper nodes labelled "Entire Animation".


And indeed, whenever I add a new Plasma material, I find that an additional 'Entire Animation' node has been added as well.
The file is now so overstuffed with these things that I'm now seeing this error message when a new Plasma material is created:

(The humor in the error message indicates it's a Cyan internal note!)

I've tried selecting these in the Selection Floater and deleting them, with variably disastrous results.

At one point, I thought these helpers were being creating through the Plasma material's Animation checkoff for the 'Loop' function. But after going through about a hundred materials and unchecking their unnecessary 'Loop' option, the number of 'Entire Animation' nodes had not decreased (possibly once they're created, they aren't removed when the connection is eliminated?)

And I've tried the trick of Merging all the Age's assets into a new blank file, which will often clean up unused materials and nodes. Of course, doing this at Max level won't import Plasma functionality. But while using the Plasma Merge function does seem to clean up the worst of the 'Entire Animation' nodes, I now get frequent crashes from the resulting .max file.

Okay, so essentially, what I'm asking is:
- Has anyone else seen this unwanted creation of 'Entire Animation' nodes when Plasma materials are created?
- And do you have any idea what setting is causing this to happen?

I haven't been able to find the cause!

[Jhon J. Jaguar]

Shorah Emor.
For first the Entire animation node is important for MAX. It is use for know what kind of animation Max most work into the animation setting. There are 2 kind of animations: Entire or with keys.
In first case, the animation run from the first key to the last without delaies or locks. In the second, the animation start and stop between 2 keys into the Timeline and specified in a note of Graphics animation.
For not have problems with the animations is better DON'T CHANGE THEIR NAMES, and use the number strictly needed.
The creation of those voices is automatic, all times you give an animated caracter of an object, like Solid, Texture, Python, ecc. Is the mode of MAX to teel you: "OK, this object have some kind of animation, i know. tell me how i most job with it!"
I test to insert an image but the Forum not permite me it.
At the end, if you will create an animation, is better you know what you do and for what reason. If is not necessary, don't use they: can create confusion.
I hope my answer satisfing you.

[Emor D'ni Lap]

Thank you Jhon.

Of course if I were to create an animation - on an object or a texture, on any value, anything - I would expect an animation (helper) node to be created.

The problem here is that these helper nodes are created automatically when any new Plasma material is created. There is no animation involved at this point, so neither Max nor Plasma should be creating any "Entire Animation" nodes. I never noticed this before, possibly because I'd never worked with a project containing over 1024 materials before.

Regarding adding images: although I like this forum software a lot, uploading images has to be done through the "New Attachment" panel at the bottom of the "Post a New Reply" page where you write your post. 'Browse' to your image, then click the "Add Attachment" button. Your image name will appear in a new line below "New Attachment", click the "Insert Into Post" button at right, with your cursor at the insert point in your message.
The "image" icon at top of that page is for inserting an image already available online, as an URL.

You can also refer to this post: https://www.writers-guild.org/Forum/show...php?tid=34

[Jhon J. Jaguar]

Thanks for the info. This is the screenshot i have prepared for my last post.
   

[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?