Maxwell Render

First of all I'd like to thank all Next Limit team for this great release!

Are you planning to add some documentation, tips&tricks, common workflows or tutorials on using new features in Maya?

I am currently playing with a new hair renderer and got some questions.

1. Does Maxwell support native Maya Fur, Maya Paint Effects or is it just Maya Hair that works for now?
2. I can't find a way to use UV Channel = 1 mapping. All I get is an arbitrary constant color. But using UV Channel = 0 works fine — painting along the fibers. Is there any special way to map UV Channel = 1 for hair system? As far as I know mapping can be projected to polygons and NURBS surfaces only?
3. I'd like to use this new system for planting grass. Is there any way to make hair not round but flat in cross section, like grass leaves? Or maybe even render it as a single-sided geometry?

More questions to come

Thank you!

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Regards,
Andrey Babak
WIP | Gallery | Blog

We plan to write a new manual for the plug-in and we'll explain everything in there. About your specific questions:

1. The Maxwell hair primitive renders lines as procedural cones. PaintFX lines are translated to that (including Maya hair), but Maya fur does not give us the line data, so we can't render it with this extension.

2. Maya hair does not generate root UVs, so channel 1 is not present. Only Shave&Haircut does that in Maya. Maya hair can only be mapped lengthwise, with UV set 0.

3. No, it always renders cones.

Thank you for clarification!

_________________
Regards,
Andrey Babak
WIP | Gallery | Blog

Is it a temporary limitation? As I can see each Maya Hair Follicle node has Parameter U and Parameter V, so some kind of mapping is obviously present and it's a matter of conversion by Maxwell plugin, am I right?

Thank you!

_________________
Regards,
Andrey Babak
WIP | Gallery | Blog

Sorry if this question is out of place... but I'm playing with rendering hair in maya and I have never used hair before. How do I apply a maxwell material to the hair object?

Typically to apply a material to an object I would select the object, then right click on the material in the hypershade and click "apply to selected." However this doesn't seem to work with hair.

Unfortunately there's no way to retrieve those parameters from the plug-in using the PaintFX API. We will check if there are other ways to access the data.



Since Maya doesn't have the concept of applying materials to hair objects, we had to add our own control for it. Select the hair shape, scroll down and expand the "Maxwell Render" rollup. You'll see a control for assigning a Maxwell material in there.

I'm still not seeing the control. Is it in the attribute editor for the hair shape? Or in the hypershade?

attribute editor

I see a mental ray control, but no Maxwell.

The plugin is installed and working... I can render the hair but it renders with the default "no material" red color.

I should clarify - This is fur not hair. I just tried with hair and found it....

Does this not work with fur as well?

Fur is not supported at the moment... only if you have shave..

h/

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sing with me.... la la la... la la la

Shave & Haircut is indeed working fine with Maxwell.

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Mac OS X 10.8.3 | Mac Pro Nehalem 8-core 2.66 GHz | 24GB RAM
Maxwell 2.7.2 | Maya 2014

Can I do this UV channel 0, channel 1 thing from within Maya?

http://support.nextlimit.com/display/ma ... r+and+Hair

Or do I have to export to Studio?

UV channel 1 (root UVs) only works for Shave hair. PaintFX curves do not expose the necessary data to plug-ins. UV channel 0 works everywhere since it's computed automatically by Maxwell.

I have Shave (just got it) and I got the colored map hair to work in Studio via Shave hair, but can I use Shave hair, assign UV 1 color maps, and stay within the Maya plugin?