|
This is a flaw in Scatter, not the proxies themselves.
Scatter (like many other max tools) come from a mindset of “making many objects is difficult, but many polygons is not” (I.e. max will be unusable with a million single-polygon objects, but work fine with a single million polygon object).
For this reason, Scatter (and many other things in max) actually copy the geometry of the object, rather than instance the object itself!
Since the mr Proxy doesn’t have any geometry, this naturaly doesn’t work. (The proxy is an instance of a helper that reffers external data stored on disk, that is only loaded on demand when a ray hits the bounding box of the proxy).
Fear not: Peter Watje’s Scatter tool works fine with proxies, find it at maxplugins.de by going to the appropriate version and simply search for “Scatter”, you can’t miss it.
I even blogged in quite high detail about this topic in my latest post:
http://mentalraytips.blogspot.co...eased-mr-proxies-and.html
The issue is exactly the same for most built-in max things that reference other scene objects; it tend to be written as to copy the polygons, rather than make a real instance of the original. For the proxies to work it must be an instance of the original, nothing else is possible.
This is true also for particle systems, including PFlow.
As always, Bobo comes to the rescue with a scriptlet, which I posted on my blog.
/Z
| 
