Maxwell Render

Hi

I'm loving Maxwell 2.7. But a couple of little hiccups. First, I cannot get the 2.7.4 (Jun 18th) LightWave plug-in to work. I'm using LW 10.1, 32-bit WinXP. The install seems to go fine, but within Layout my pressing Maxwell's buttons just gets me "Plug-in Maxwell Interactive failed to start" "Plug-in Maxwell Properties failed to start", etc. I've tried manually installing the plug-in in Layout via Utilities/"Add plugins" but to no avail; my clicking on the plugin reports, "Plugin were not found or could not be added." Is 2.7 for LW11 only by some chance (even though the portal download page says "10.1")?
Reverting back to the 2.6 plug-in works okay, and that's what I've been using, but I've never been able not to use a plugin update before so I'm a little baffled. If it's just some little thing then forgive me for missing it, but do enlighten me please.

On the other subject...
I've been given a chance to test out some so my Maxwell-rendered animation footage on a nice 3D projection system, so I wish to re-render it out for that. LightWave does Stereoscopic output, but I see nothing in the (2.6) M~R plugin to that end, and I've not come up with a work-around to easily get LightWave's cameras "Stereo 3D Rendering" settings to Maxwell. (I'd really prefer not to have to manually shift the camera over _mms in the scene, rotate it to match the convergence point, repeat for other eye, etc.)
I'm guessing that doing 3D Maxwell via the LW plugin isn't a feature that's capable yet, but I figured I'd ask.

Thanks for listening

- Will

Can you check which path is displayed in the installer in the LW 10 box on the second page? If Lightwave is installed in the default location, it should say "c:\Program Files\NewTek\LightWave10.0\support\plugins\". Also, can you confirm that there's no path in the LW 10 box on the third page, the one with the 64-bit versions? On the 4th page, if you expand the "Plug-in" group, do you see "Lightwave 10 (32-bit)" checked and "Lightwave 10 (64-bit)" unchecked?

How big is the maxwell.p file found in c:\Program Files\NewTek\LightWave10.0\support\plugins\maxwell? It should be 4,994,048 bytes. I'm suspecting you somehow got the 64-bit maxwell.p installed instead of the 32-bit version, in which case the file would be 6,110,208 bytes.

Stereo cameras are not supported at the moment, but I've added that on the todo list.

After reading your post I went back to try it all once again, and found my mistake. There are four fields on the page, the first two path fields labeled "LW8" and "LW9" then the other two fields after just say "LW" and "LW" (on my installer anyway). Well, I kept mistakenly assuming the first of those "LW" fields was "LW 10.0" and the second one "LW10.1" rather than for "LW10" and "LW11" respectively; i.e., I kept trying to use that bottom field for the LW10.1 path, and that's what was giving me the trouble of course. My silly goof. It's all working now, sorry for bothering you with that.

At least I got to ask about the one thing I was really interested in...
I'm hoping it's not a huge pain, but something tells me it might be. (And I'm guessing it's that Maxwell as a whole doesn't have stereo 3D yet, not just a matter of the LightWave plug-in.) Well, if you guys/gals can pull it off then it would be great for those of us more on the movie end than on the print and web ends. 3D Maxwell renders/animations popping out would be so neat!

Thanks for the reply Mihnea. Much appreciated.

Could you show me a screenshot with the installer, please? Those fields should say LW 10 and LW 11, but maybe the text doesn't fit due to different font sizes or something, and we have to fix that.

What I can do from the plug-in side is to export two cameras and/or to start two renders, one for each eye. You've guess correctly, Maxwell doesn't support stereo directly right now.

I'll pm you a screenshot, sure.

That would be great. Perhaps something like:
- In the plugin, maybe under the "Separate Light Files" checkbox you could add a "Stereoscopic rendering" checkbox (and that would be the only added Maxwell plugin control).
- When checked, the plugin would simply read the data from the LightWave camera properties of the Stereoscopic section to gain the needed modifiers (how far to move the camera over for "Eye separation", how much to rotate the camera on its Y to create the convergence point; I don't know what the "toe-in" percentage does but it's grayed out on the classic camera anyway ).
- With the modifiers acquired, the plug-in would have to create two different scene files I'd assume since there are now two different Maxwell cameras. And it's double rendering (until the Stereoscopic box is unchecked), however you'd do that.

I'm just imagining here, and note I haven't even done 3D stereo rendering yet myself so maybe someone here in the LightWave section who has good experience with it can be of help as far as suggestions and pitfalls to look out for. This would be really cool if we could do this (without it being a big pain for you, Mihnea). Hopefully LightWave makes it easy to grab those modifiers for the Maxwell camera(s)!