How to get Textures shared between users on a network

[Anonymous]

I been trying to get the texture search path setup so that the project looks at a folder on a mapped network drive instead of C:\User\Public\Public Documents\Autodesk\Inventor 10

We are currently using Vault & we are starting to add bmp textures to a lot of our models. I've copied my textures folder (from the above location) to our shared server. But i cant get the project to use it as the default location, it keeps looking at the C: dive.

I tried this guide  http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor/Textures-amp-Design-Data/m-p/2834985/highlight/true#...

but I'm getting a little lost. Do i need to edit our Vault project to look like the one in the guide? If so, it wont let me.

Can someone give me some pointers.

Cheers 

btw.

Spec:

Win 7, Inventor 2010, Vault

[blair]

This should fall into the "Design Data". This is normally mapped to each user's local machine. You might try setting up a dedicated folder on your server and changing each user's machine: Application Options>File>Design Data: to point to that location

[Anonymous]

I dont think this works.

I have put the Texture folder in to the Design Data folder on the server & the Applications Option points to this location but the Texture option in the model style and standards points still looks in the Texture folder on my PCs C: Drive

[scottmoyse]

I can help you with this. I will post tomorrow i don't have time right now. There are problems using it with Vault though, we have jsut got rid of it. There is a bug which causes problems but at this stage Autodesk say its as designed, I just need to get some videos and a dataset together to prove to them otherwise.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Scott, look forward to the reply.

[scottmoyse]

Your post is good timing, because for the moment we have just stopped doing this, since we have just started implementing Vault. Its ludicrous to have to copy out a texture file ot each local PC everytime you want to create a new material with a new color. Or change the texture file for an existing one.

This took me a good day to figure out, and isn't listed anywhere that i could find in the help files. However, if you go to the texture selection dialogue in the styles editor then your clue is there.

Notice two options, Application Library and Project Library. So the App Library points to the program files directory if you are on XP and to an autodesk folder in the public folders if you are on Vista or Win7. 

You need to use a Project library, so all you need to do is set up a couple of library paths in your project:

I have two one for textures and one of bumpmaps.

Then you need to go through each color style in the style editor and reselect the image file for each color affected, You have to click on project library and then select the library folder, at which point you will have to wait 10 seconds for the selection to update, pick the texture and 'ok' out, you should now have a file path showing which matches the library path you set. Do this for every color that has a texture and then save it out to a style library if you use them (you should be if you aren't).

You can set it up so you have different texture libraries for each project, since some projects have different texture/color requirements. all you need to do is copy out the design data to the new folder location and reset the library path. The color style texture path will update to suit.

note: it doesn't make any difference, but to keep things tidy I placed the texture and bumpmap folder in the same location as the design data.

It works brilliantly, you can even change the appearance of everyones material instantaneously, without the tideous need to update the styles, just by overwriting the image with a file of the same name. Note to autodesk, your process for updating color and material styles is hideous and has bugs! thats for another post.

Now here come the curly bits in my next post. Make sure you read it because it affects loading any files into vault.It may make you rethink doing this. Its a pearler and it guessing its because not very many people have shared network paths for their textures. Its beyond me why they don't.

[scottmoyse · Accepted solution]

Now for the let down:

Each time you change the material or color using the new drop down menu, a link is created to the image under Tools>Options>Links. It also doesn't remove the link when the material or color isn't set anymore.

Note the links button is greyed out:

Now If i change the material to ply; aromatic cedate which uses the wood_5.bmp it does the following:

Now there is a link, if you click on the links button you will see:

Then every time you change the material or color, to one that uses a project library image a new link will be added. This does not happen if the color style uses an application library image.

According to our reseller Autodesk Claims this is 'As Designed'. I haven't yet submitted this to Autodesk myself yet, i will do, to try and convince them otherwise. Since here comes the best bit, that in my opinion shows it is not as designed.

As you can see I have the Carpet_Pat01 color style set, its a Native Inventor color style, the only difference is I have the color style pointing to the image file via a project library. Which is a search path much like the hard coded application library path will be. 

They claim the link in the links dialogue is required and 'As Designed' if thats the case, then if i delete it, Inventor will no longer be able to find the image and will cease to display it on the solid. Now lets see:

Carpet_pat01 is there, showing as being on the J: drive. Now I will break the link, which will remove it:

The link is no longer there, but the part is still more than happy to display the image on the faces of the solid. Which proves the link that was created by inventor is useless and creating resource demands for no good reason.

As you can imagine this caused as a great deal of problems when it came to uploading out data to Vault. We only discovered there was a problem when vault started asking for all these bitmaps. We had to write a macro to remove the links, which are very stubborn to remove through VBA i might add, on some parts it had to repeat the code more than 50 times before it removed some of the links, for no apparent reason and trust me we looked.

We toyed with the idea of having the texture and bumpmap folders in vault, however, this meant there would still have to be local copies (in the workspace) in addition to the copies in vault. We also lost the ability to update the images in real time if we chose to. We could live with all that though, the clincher for me was the infuriatingly useless links that are created. I didn't want those to be continually blighting the system, we can easily change the material or color on a part 10+ times, which in turn creates 10+ of those useless links.

So much to our dissapointment, we used our macro to strip all the links out of our data and reverted back to using application library textures. We are in the process of creating a bat file to sync a network folder of textures to the local application texture folders.

In reality we should be charging Autodesk for this time. Here's dreaming.

Any questions?

Need any datasets? If so let me know.

It would be great if someone from autodesk would reply to this post please.

cheers

Scott.

[Anonymous]

Works brilliant thank you.

Got it working with Vault as well.

The only thing i 'dislike' about it is that it saves a copy of the texture to the Vault. So, instead of looking in the Textures folder on the network drive it recalls the texture fro mthe Vault.

I can see the logic in that - but i dont like have the texture twice.

[Anonymous]

Just another quick question:

When I uploaded my file to Vault. I asked me to 'Map' the Texture folders - Surface Textures & Bump Maps. I did this & its now created 2 new folder within Vault. However, if i delete them & redo the part if just recreates these folders again without asking me. All i want to do is restructure these 'Mapped' folders but cant find the option.

Cheers

[scottmoyse · Accepted solution]

Do you know how to map vault folders for a new project? on the vault tab in inventor, click the drop down, and select map folders, you need to tell vault where the texture libraries. vault folder location is. So the folder needs to be present in Vault before you can do that.

So are you happy with the useless links being added to every single file? I'm ok with the image files being in two locations (local & Vault, that makes perfect sense) but i'm not ok with all those links beign created as well. Those don't make any sense.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Scott. Didn’t see the drop down menu in Vault > Access.  Doh!!

I’m happy with useless links. Our company doesn’t use textures that often. But it’s extremely helpful to have everyone looking in the correct place.

Really appreciate all the help you've given. I've been dropped in to the deep end 'cos our normal CAD/Vault admin guy left last week so it’s all up to me to sort it out!!!!

[scottmoyse · Accepted solution]

check out the under the hood blog, just search for keywords, i only started with Vault 2 weeks ago, gone from nothign straight to professional. has been a proper mission! the help file is also ok, but you can refer to & search the cracking the vault blog as well. The vault wiki is a more user friendly version of the help file.

happy to help.

[scottmoyse]

just out of interest do you mind telling me where you are based?

[Anonymous]

Malvern in Worcester, UK.

[scottmoyse]

just outside motorsport valley!? I'm from cornwall originally, living in NZ now. Anyway all the best!