Arnold and photoshop files

[Anonymous]

After several hours of trying to "diagnose" the issue and search the net for an answer...I've come to the conclusion that PSD files do not play well with the Arnold renderer. Long story short...I assigned a PSD texture to the base color slot/map of a standard surface shader. When I made changes to the texture and saved the changes in photoshop, the map would update on my model in the view port but would not update in the material browser. What was more confusing was that even though it was updating in the viewport, when I rendered it, it was rendering with the original map as if no changes had been made or saved. I'm assuming it's the PSD format itself because I've used JPEGS as textures with Arnold with no problems. I also used and updated PSD files using the scanline renderer and it works fine. I guess my question is am I on the right track? Is this a legitimate conclusion or have I pressed some sort of "hidden" button that I'm not aware of. If it is a bug is there a workaround? Incidentally, I have updated to the latest version of Arnold and Max and the problem still exists.

[Francisco_Penaloza]

Well, I can't talk from the Arnold side, because I don't use that render engine, but even with other renderers, I would not recommend using PSD as textures.  As you notice this can create more problems than help you. PSD files can grow in size exponentially and then your Max file will have to load all that in RAM while rendering.

Maybe you can't see it in your viewport or Material editor because the buffered memory is full already.

It won't take you more than a minute and save your PSD as JPG or other and use a single flat image for texture.

Even the Vector loader can put your 3dMax file at its knees when working in large files.

[Anonymous]

While I do appreciate the response I have to wonder if you actually read my post. If you can't "speak" to the Arnold renderer, which is what the post was about, then you probably shouldn't have responded. Your solution may be helpful in some other circumstance but not even close to my question. I've used the same texturing workflow in Max for about 10 years or so now. I always bring my unwrapped UVWs into photoshop, layout my texture and then apply that to my model as a working texture, if you will. I make my changes and tweaks and they have always updated in the material editor, viewport and on my model. And they still do when I'm using this method with the scanline renderer and when I used MR in previous max versions. When I'm satisfied with my texture I save the final diffuse map as a JPEG. I've NEVER, used a PSD file as a final diffuse map. I've also NEVER had an issue as the one I described until I tried it with Arnold. I made that clear in my post. As to not seeing updates in the viewport and material editor...that's not what I wrote either. I'm not going to rewrite my entire post so if you're interested in what I wrote about that, you can read it again.  

[giuseppe.schiralli · Accepted solution]

The workflow you are using is supported. Can you try to use Main Toolbar>Arnold>Flush Cashes>Texture after you saved the changes in Photoshop, and restart Active Shade if you are using it?

This should force Arnold to read again the texture.

Thanks!

Giuseppe

[Stephen.Blair]

I was testing with 3ds Max 2019, and even with a jpg texture I need to flush the cache, then Update Preview (or restart Active Shade). That's what I expected.

[Stephen.Blair]

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@Stephen.Blair wrote:

I was testing with 3ds Max 2019, and even with a jpg texture I need to flush the cache, then Update Preview (or restart Active Shade). That's what I expected.

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Because Arnold uses a texture cache. Texture tiles are loaded in the cache as required, so we're not always reading texture data directly from disk. 

The advantage of the cache is that you can have TBs of data and use only a few GB of memory to render.

When maxtoa has autotx, you won't have to flush the cache manually. When you update the render (re-render the Active Shade) then the autotx will generate an new tx file and trigger a cache update. That's how it works in Maya now.

[Anonymous]

Works for me in this manner...Arnold/Flush Caches/ All. Then I go into Photoshop, make the changes to my textures, save, go back into max and everything updates as expected. So each time I leave max to tweak my textures I have to flush the caches otherwise the textures will not update.  Slightly time-consuming, most definitely annoying. I'm really trying to like Arnold, and I do for the most part but little things like this sure make me miss MR! Thank you for your help in solving this very frustrating problem.