Beware: ACA2014, 15 corrupt aecMaterials for rendering.

[ntellery]

I will post a full report to Adesk but I post here in case it happens to you.

I've attached a drawing that if you open and render, you will note the columns do not appear.

The columns surround the carport on the left and hold up the verandah/balconies on the main building.

You will get maps missing for materials but that is irrelevant.  It should still render an object albeit with the object colour rather than any material mapped.

So if you are rendering in 14 & 15, note that to correct you will have to swap the aecMaterial assigned for that/those objects that are missing once rendered.

This happens to me quite often (in about 3 of 4 or 5 projects so far using ACA2015 and it was so bad in 14 it scared me off using it).  I don't know why it happens.  Once corrupted the file will still exhibit the corruption when opened in 13, even if it was fine in 13 before.

At this point it seems random which aecmaterials it affects and it only seems to be the render map attachment and rendering that is affected.  The aecMaterial seems to work fine for drawing work in general.

I will try to attach other examples of the corruption as sometimes it is a number of aecMaterials affected.

cheers

[BillGlennie]

Our investigation shows that this is an issue only when the current visual style is 2D or 3D wireframe, and the render material is set to NONE.  So if you encounter this issue, switch to a different visual style, such as Shaded.  That should allow the rendering to proceed properly.  We are continuing to investigate a fix.  Apologies for the inconvenience.  But rest assured that there is no corruption in the materials.

Thanks,  Bill 

[ntellery]

When you say ‘materials’ do you mean aecmaterial or render material?
I find failure when the same aecmat is assigned in several places.

When what is “set to none”? AecObjects are failing on me when they have an aecMat assignment.

Thanks for working on it Bill.


Unfortunately having the viewport in shaded slows things down a lot even when trying to edit in another viewport and I have a decent machine on small projects.
Be great if you could get the ESC key to work asap whilst trialling a render instead of it ignoring and finishing the render (especially if mats aren’t working).

[BillGlennie]

I mean the Render Material setting on the Other tab of the AEC Material display properties.  See below.  If this is set to a valid material, rather than *NONE*, the visual style of the active viewport doesn't matter.  If this is set to *NONE*, you can switch to a shaded visual style, then run Render, and the results will be as expected.  You don't need to work all the time in the non-wireframe visual style.

Let me know if you need more information.

Thanks,  Bill