I just wasted about a half hour of work because of the stupid %i feature which is forced on the user. %i is automatically added to the end of any file name entered in for a displacement or normal map. I DON’T WANT that. I only want one file, and when I create a new one, I want to save over the old one, but I’m not given that choice. So instead I have to browse to the directory, find the file that I no longer want, and delete it before I render the new one. I figured this would be good enough, but there were more problems still.

When I tried to do a mesh displace, MB subdivided my mesh and displaced nothing. It gave NO ERROR MESSAGE at all. It acted as though I was using an empty displacement map. This was very maddening. The problem was, once again, %i!!! Mudbox was looking for myfilename%i. %i being some unknown number however. Not 0001. I went so far as to browse to my directory, and specify the file directly, and after that failed, I typed in the file name exactly. What does MB do? It changed 0001 into %i!!! F#$%!!!! It was wrong! It wasn’t finding the file, and it wasn’t bothering to tell me that it was trying to do a displace with a non-existent file!

Remove %i! I hate that “feature”. I just want to be able to specify exactly what file I want and know that I’m going to get what I see and what I expect.

K.I.S.S.