Troubleshooting my Saved Shader Presets [SOLVED]

john_antkowiak

Hi. I've had this happen at least twice. I save a lot of shader presets after adjusting the surface channels just the way I want. I accumulate a lot of these. On rare occasions, they just all disappear from the Preset pane. This time, I know it's a result of reinstalling; not sure if that's what happened last time. Regardless, they're all gone. So to illlustrate, I made a new one and saved it as a shader preset. Then I came to the Surfaces tab, Presets pane. You can see that there's only one saved preset in the list of choices: "Marx leather brown." But in the same folder with this file are all my other saved presets - so why can't I see them in the pane? A related issue (previously) has been that they're all listed but the thumbnails are blank placeholders and I can't apply them. How does this pane work? Can I configure the tool to point it to the place where they are? Can I search for them somehow?

I haven't slept all night; I hope my question is clear and that I'm not babbling. Please let me know if I've forgotten a relavant aspect of the problem. Thanks!

skinklizzard

Un check the filter by context option at the bottom and it will show every preset, I believe there is metadata involved with the context of what the presets are for, similar to smart content, which would be lost on a reinstall, you could try reimporting metadata or scanning known directories for files from the content library burger menu.

the blank placeholder issue is related in that the files are not on the path the database expects them to be, from when the metadata was saved, if it has a little exclamation mark in the bottom corner and a dotted yellow border I believe all files are mising, if its just the placeholder image and no yellow border its probably just the icon image missing (but those you should be able to apply)

Richard Haseltine

The Prsets tabs are drawn from the Content Management System, not from the file location. Anything that wipes the databse will remove them, unless user data was exported before the wipe and reimported after.

john_antkowiak

All very useful stuff, thank you so much ))  At least now I know I can go to my directory and delete them all, as they no longer serve any function. I'll just save them again as the need arises. FWIW I tried it both ways, with the box checked and cleared. They didn't come back either way. Oh well. Have a great day!

Richard Haseltine

You could recategorise them and set their compatibility, then they would show in the Presets pane - the right-click menu on the files in the Content Library pane will do that (sorry for not saying so first time).