Hi Paul,
This morning I had a conversation with Przemysław from Rhino Nature, we talked about the current problems when collaborating on scenes on different network environments, which becomes more and more important these days.
One of the biggest issues IMHO is the lack of an asset managing system for textures where the user can see the used textures, missing textures and has the ability to exchange textures.
I know we talked about this for several years now, the bottom line was that you said it is to complex to implement, so if we cannot have a full asset management system like e.g. vray has, may I at least ask for something like this:
1. The ability to have a "pack and go" feature that would gather all textures used by octanes materials (and eventually rhino materials...) and save them to a user defined folder like [*.3dm root]/maps.
2. Give Octane the ability to do a standard search at some standard relative paths like [*.3dm root]/maps, [*.3dm root]/textures, [*.3dm root]/library . Ideally we would have hard wired predefined definitions like the aforementioned and the possibility to add user defined to that.
3.Give the user the ability to define custom network search paths, where Octane would automatically search when it does not find a texture. This is especially valuable in situations where texture locations are spreaded out over several different volumes and could save much time.
With these tools we would have at least a little bit more help to tame some of these projects.
thank you for looking into this and best regards
Andreas