- [Narrator] As I've mentioned a few times
throughout the course, any dependent files,
such as textures or x-refs,
need to be located inside the current project.
And when you link to a file,
you always need to link to something
that's inside the current project.
But sometimes despite our best intentions
assets get lost or paths get mangled.
Let me show you how to fix it
when 3D max can't find the dependent files.
I've got a scene set up to illustrate.
This scene is broken on purpose
in order to illustrate the issue.
I'll go to file, open,
and in the current projects, exercise files, scenes
I want to open up a file called 1015 asset tracking.max
click on that and click open
and we get a dialogue
missing external files.
Well, this dialogue is extremely problematic.
I would say it's misleading and dangerous.
It's saying that we're missing a dot png file,
okay that's good.
I'm glad we got notified.
Okay well, what should I do?
You know some buttons down here,
if we click remove all,
that is going to annihilate
all references to all dependent files.
If you click that remove all button
you're going to break your scene,
and then if you save over the top of that scene,
you will be in very deep trouble
and it may take hours
for you to manually reconstruct what you've lost.
So absolutely do not click that remove all button.
Then we come to browse.
That sounds good, okay.
Well, browse is deceptive
and it is highly likely to lure you
into a false sense of security.
If you click browse, you'll be taken
to another window where you can choose a path.
What you're doing in there is defining
what's known as a user path
in the 3DS Max configuration.
And from that point onward,
3DS Max will go looking
for textures and other dependent files
in whatever folder you've specified.
Well, that's good in as much
as it will actually load the dependency
but it's bad because if that dependent file is sitting
outside of your current project,
you won't get any notification to that effect.
You won't even know
that there's a potential issue down the road
in a situation like that if you back up your project,
or archive it, or move it to another workstation
and so on,
then you're not actually managing
all of the dependent files.
Some of the files will be in some mysterious folder
that you previously browsed for maybe years ago,
and you won't even know.
So again, don't click browse.
It's super dangerous.
The only safe and sane thing to do
when you see this dialogue is to exit it
without doing anything.
You can click continue or you can close the window.
They both do the same thing, which is nothing.
Okay now the scene loads and I have two boxes here.
One of them actually has a bitmap texture on it,
that was the png file.
The other box, this one
actually has a vector art texture applied to it,
but I only got a notification for the bitmap texture.
Unfortunately for certain file types
you will not get a message about the missing dependency.
The only way you'll know is because your file doesn't load.
And in this case, the vector art map node
displays a placeholder image of these arrows.
To repair the links to broken assets,
go into the asset tracking dialogue.
That's in the file menu,
go to reference,
asset tracking toggle.
And we can make this bigger,
we can expand the size of these columns
so we can see what we're dealing with.
So we see that we have wood panels thin diffused
2048 by 2048.png
file missing.
Also logo.svg, file missing.
Well, we can quite easily browse to relink those files.
And so we can select these
pull down shift to select more than one.
We can do it from the paths menu, set path
or we can just right click,
and from the quad menu choose, set path.
We get another dialogue, specify assets path
and we can either type in a path or we can just browse.
We've got a little ellipsis button over here on the right
looks like 3 dots, click on that
and we get our choose a new asset path dialogue,
and once again, we want to browse
to a folder within our current project
which is exercise files,
and they're in seen assets, images.
And having navigated to that path,
we see it listed down here at the bottom
and we can just click use path.
Once it's in there, we can click okay
and now we see we have a full path listed
and we see the status is okay.
Okay is different to found.
Okay means it's actually where we said
it was going to be.
Found means 3DS Max found it somewhere
not necessarily where you said it would be.
Okay and if we look in our view port, boom.
We've got an svg file here,
and we've got a bitmap file over here.
All right, let's talk about this absolute path business
we see that we're getting a drive letter
and the entire path to those files.
But earlier in the course, I recommended
that you enable convert local file paths
to relative in the preferences.
And that way paths would be displayed
as relative to the current project,
instead of absolute with a drive letter
or a network volume.
So if you enabled convert local file paths to relative,
then this path would actually be displayed as relative
but only after you save the file
and reopen the scene.
A better way would be to explicitly enter a relative path.
Let's do that instead.
I can select these two again,
hold down shift and select them both,
right click, go to set path,
and the only part of this
that's really needed is scene assets/images.
I could type that in, but in this case it's already here.
I can just delete everything before scene assets images.
So it just starts with the letter S,
scene assets and then slash images,
and then there's a trailing slash.
It's all we need.
Click okay, and now we see seen assets images in this field
that's a relative path and it says found again
because it didn't actually find it
in the specific location that we specified
coz that specific location doesn't exist.
It's just a relative path to our current project.
But this is what we want.
This is actually the ideal scenario.
All right, cool.
So that is how to fix problems
with missing assets using asset tracking.