FAQ

Flatiron offers you the choice between two different texture baking modes: Single Pass baking (default) and Multi Pass baking. In Single Pass mode all picked objects are baked at the same time into the texture during a single render job. In Multi Pass mode the individual objects are baked in separate render jobs.
In most cases Single Pass is the preferred method because the required time for baking is significantly smaller while yielding the same results. But depending on the individual requirements and the utilized renderer there can be situations where Single Pass yields unexpected render results and Multi Pass might be the preferred solution. Refer to the chapter ‘Texture Baking Modes’ in the Flatiron User Manual for more details.

This happens when gamma correction is enabled in your 3ds Max preferences and the Flatiron bitmap output is not set to the correct gamma value.
Solution: Override the gamma settings of the bitmap with the real 1.0 value or turn off your gamma settings.

Check your selected bake element. Not all bake elements are compatible with all renderers.
For example V-Ray does not support the default render elements that the Scanline renderer and Mental Ray use.
Instead, V-Ray brings its own render elements. Just pick those instead of the default render materials when you use V-Ray.
Using a V-Ray element with another renderer will fail accordingly.

Some of the objects on an unwrapped map are much larger or smaller than they should be when considering the mesh surfaces in the scene. This is most likely the result of objects being imported from another application (AutoCAD, Maya, etc.). During the import the vertex scale was not set properly or the objects were rescaled by changing world space sizes.
To fix this, simply select the objects, go to the “Utilities” panel and press “Reset X-Form”. This will set the object scaling to uniform defaults.
The same problem can be observed by applying a fractal noise texture to the objects: noise will look small on some and large on other objects even though they have similar sizes.

Make sure that you are not using the V-Ray Virtual Frame Buffer with color and gamma post processing. These effects don’t work with texture baking.
Also make sure that you are not using the light cache. Light cache works great in camera view but deliver suboptimal bake results. You should instead switch to irradiance map or brute force for global illumination.

Flatiron will initiate the merge when it receives the message from the Backburner manager that the render job is completed. If Flatiron loses the connection due to network issues or because the 3ds Max instance from which the job was sent is closed it can never receive the message and will not complete the merge.
In these cases you can use the button ‘Manual Merge’ to complete the job when the network render is done. For more details about this, please refer to the chapter ‘Network Rendering’ in the Flatiron user manual or contact us.

Receiving an error message ‘Error code 126 – The specified module could not be found’ when you try to start 3ds Max with Flatiron indicates that you do not have Microsoft DirectX9c installed on the computer you’re trying to use Flatiron on.
You lay have DirectX10 or later installed but this does not automatically include version 9c. DirectX9 and DirectX10 can be installed next to each other on the same computer. You will not ‘downgrade’ or lose any DirectX10 capabilities by installing DirectX9c.

You can download Microsoft DirectX9c from the Microsoft download center here.