Known Issues

This script isn't perfect. It may never be. It is "pretty good" but tends to wig out for unknown reasons at random intervals. I do my best to make sure it does something useful, so if something does break please be a nice person and tell me about it. Actually if you could just fix the problem and mail me a patch (setherNO@SPAMtru7h.org) that would be even better. ;)

That said, here are the known issues/bugs with this implementation:

• Only "Standard Materials" are supported.
• Error checking sucks. Really big scenes are prone to crash the script (not gmax, just the script).
• No culling. This means that every object in the scene is exported, which slows down said exporting and probably slows down rendering. Since I'm writing this stuff as I learn MAXScript I'm hoping I'll find a way to detect if an object is in a viewport, but time will tell.

Troubleshooting

A small section (hopefully!) detailing some of the most common problems I've seen in scenes.

1. Completely black render? Lighting is a pain in the ass. Because gmax and yafray are seperate programs, sometimes they see the same thing in different ways. The best explanation I can come up with for this is that gmax scenes tend to be significantly larger (in terms of volume of space) than yafray is expecting to deal with. With regards to lighting, the effect this most commonly has is that lights don't dish out enough power to actually light the scene. Resolution? Crank up the light.

   This is simple to deal with. I created a little spinbox in the Yafray Renderer rollout (in gmax) that lets you configure a multiplier to apply to any light sources in your map. The default is 10, which is probably too low for any large scene. Feel free to crank things up.. getting light to all corners can sometimes require a multiplier of 3000 or higher. The problem this may introduce is some hot spots on objects closest to the light, blinding out all the detail. This is an unresolved complication, if you find a good way to get around this I'd love to hear about it.

2. Weird dots on your model? Near as I can tell, this is a bug in yafray. I tried to find an explanation on the forum, and it doesn't appear that you did anything wrong with the export.. it's just yafray is choking on some of the data in your scene. Really large surfaces were cited as one cause. As of version 11, you can do a global scale on your scene during export to shrink things down. This improves results in yafray quite a bit.

   If you're confused what I'm talking about, you can see an example of this problem by clicking here.

3. I turned on GI and yafray crashed with some kind of stack dump or something! - I have no earthly idea why this is. Hopefully I can figure it out soon, but what seems to be the problem is that when you have objects with Z coordinates in the negatives (or equal to zero), yafray freaks out. A workaround until I find a real fix is to just move your scene up on the Z axis.