Cache material preview renders

[markus]

Here is an idea I discussed with a fellow Max user the other day. When opening the material editor in Max I find that it's taking a long time rendering the previews of your materials before you can continue doing any kind of work. If you open any kind of complex material library (matlibs) you might as well leave and take a five-minute break before coming back and continue working. 

Can you implement some kind of caching so this is save with the max files and the material library, and doesn't need to render every time you re-open? I'm sure this would save users a lot of time and frustration!

[HazardousAdsk]

We did add something like this a few releases back - the thumbnail was stored.  I would need to validate if that is still working, but that was the whole point of the feature

[markus]

I'm using Vray btw, so I haven't tested with any of the built in renderengines. I hope this functionality is supposed to work regardless of what renderplugin is used.

[markus]

Thanks, Hazard! Now that you mention it I haven't noticed this for a while, at least not as frequently. Maybe it was a temporary relapse or upgrading to 2018 recently did the trick? If it happens again and I figure out a way to reproduce it I'll be sure to report it as a bug!

[markus]

Hi,

@HazardousAdsk  @Kelly_Michels  I know this is an old issue, and you have implemented a caching system. The caching works as long as you have one renderer only. However if you for some reason open the material editor with a different renderer than the one you would normally use, then 3dsmax immediately begin converting the thumbnails to the new renderer. This can take a long time to finish depending on how large your libraries are. To make it even worse when you switch back to your favorite renderer again it will restart the whole process. 

It would be better if this could only happen on user request. I don't really need to see how all of my material libraries look in the scanline renderer when the cached thumbnails from Vray or Arnold would be fine.

At least this is true for material libraries because they tend to be quite large. For scene materials and editor views, you should update thumbnails of course.