Maxwell Render

Hello all..

Im kinda new to sketchup and maxwell.. but i have a bit of a problem and I guess its just me! let me explain

I have made a design in sketchup with some floors and walls made of concrete. For the concrete I used the standard maxwell material. but I have changed the colors a bit. My floor is just grey, but my walls are bright orange. I also made a table counter with the same conrete material. When i try to render, the wall, floor and table are all in the same color grey. Is there something im doing wrong?

Next I tried to make a gravel floor, with the gravel.mxm I downloaded from maxwell. I have copied the mxm file into sketchup and the gravel is there, only not really a diffusion.. just a 2d surface with a pattern when i render it.

I do all my renders in sketchup with Fire!


And last of my problem.. When I try to export my model to Maxwell Render there isnt an option in the dropdown menu to select it. I have the latest version of google sketchup and maxwel render.


I hope i can get some answers..


with kind regards

wouter

Which version of the plugin are you using? There is the Standalone Maxwell for SketchUp plugin, which has no functions for exporting to Maxwell Render, and there is the Render Suite Maxwell for SketchUp plugin, which is intended for use with a full Maxwell Render license, and does have those export functions.

For your other issues, I would probably need you to email me a SketchUp file (and any related textures or MXM files) that demonstrates them, so I can check if there is a problem. Such things could be due to applying two different materials to the front and back of faces, or several other factors.

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Next Limit Team

Hello

I have both installed.. the plugin for sketchup and the maxwell 2 studio.

Where can i send the file to?

kind regards

wouter

There are two main versions of the plugin: Standalone, and Render Suite; you can find which one you are running in SketchUp by going to Plugins > Maxwell > About Maxwell. The Render Suite version is designed for use with a full Maxwell Render Suite license, which includes Maxwell Studio. While the Standalone plugin is available to the general public here, the Render Suite plugin is available from the Next Limit customer portal, here. I'm not sure which type of license you have, so please make sure you are using the correct plugin.

To send the file, you can either upload it somewhere like dropbox, or email it to me at jeremy at nextlimit dotcom.

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Next Limit Team

Hello

I have the standalone version I can see.. So what youre saying is that i cant render 3d gravel in my sketchup with this version?

My license: Maxwell Render for Google SketchUp: 1

I have sent you the file we are talking about..

with kind regards

wouter

No, I'm not saying you can't render 3D gravel (I assume you mean displacement) in the Standalone plugin -- I'm saying that you can't render in Maxwell Studio from the Standalone plugin. I got the email, so I'll take a look and see what is the problem.

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Next Limit Team

I see a few displacement-related problems with the scene. First, there are two materials which are using the gravel bitmap: [Color_A05], which is using MXM mode (in Scene Manager > Materials), but which has no MXM file linked, and grindvloer, which also uses MXM mode, and which links to an MXM named gravel.mxm.

The problem is that the face in your model that is supposed to be gravel has the [Color_A05] material applied, rather than the grindvloer material. Since [Color_A05] has no MXM assigned, a generic Maxwell material is being generated for it, which uses the gravel.jpg image specified in SketchUp material. So in your rendering, it will have the correct texture, but will not be a displacement material.

To correct this, I downloaded a random gravel displacement material from the MXM Gallery, which I think may be the same one you are using. It imported into SketchUp as a new material named gravel, which is set to use MXM mode, and points to the newly-downloaded MXM file. The scene would be ready to render, except for one other problem: due to a bug in Maxwell 2.7, before I applied this material to your plane, I removed its materials, grouped it, and applied the gravel displacement material to the group. For more on how to deal with this bug, please read here.

While the scene would now render with displacement, there is one more important improvement to make. In Maxwell, one big face is not going to produce the best displacement; it is better to subdivide the plane somewhat. For a discussion of what I mean, please see here. You can see there the effect of subdividing the plane. To quickly do this in your model, I deleted the big face with the gravel material and created a new one, using Draw > Sandbox > From Scratch, with a grid spacing of 0.05m.

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Next Limit Team

Regarding this:


I don't yet find any problem here; all of the geometry appears to be rendering with the specified materials.

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Next Limit Team

Hey there!


Thanks for taking a look at my model! Is it possible to send it back to me so i can have a look?

kind regards

wouter

I didn't save the model, so give me a little time to put it back together, and I'll email it to you.

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Next Limit Team

Hello Jeremy

thanks for watching and sending it back!


I dont really understand the rendering speed thing.. Im still pretty new to sketchup and maxwell. But when i render the scene in what you say is the fastest render, the one with the most triangles, the scene still renders pretty slow..

When I copy my gravel.mxm onto your 1m x 1m hole "fast displacement" It does render fast, and comes out better then when I make a 1m x 1m with sandbox tools > from scratch myself..

Maybe im still doing something wrong with grouping? When I do it it looks more like a carpet, but im doing the same subdivision ( 0,05 )


Maybe you can try to explain to me again ( for dummies ) how to do it? Ill appreciate it!

with kind regards

wouter,

Regarding rendering speed, it is all relative -- displacement can take substantially more time to render, even when settings and geometry have been optimized. There is no rule-of-thumb that will work best in all scenarios; we are talking here about the tradeoff between render speed optimization and displacement accuracy, where it is only the artist who can know which settings are best, since they are specific to each situation.

On the question of your MXM file looking like carpet instead of pebbles, this is likely because inside of the MXM file, the displacement component (see here) is set to use percentage of object size for its height, rather than absolute centimeters. To become more familiar with this, I would recommend downloading the Maxwell Suite demo and learning a bit about how to use MXED, which is Maxwell's standalone MXM editor.

I downloaded what I think is the same MXM as you are using and edited it to work better. Here is how it looks (with displacement enabled/disabled, so you can more easily see what it is doing):

Several changes were made to the MXM, the main one being that it now uses absolute height, so that it will work nicely on any size object. Secondly, I optimized various other parameters as well, such that how it works is that you can control how accuracy of the by the number of triangles in the meshes to which it is applied. The image above is using a plane which has a grid size of 2.5 cm -- on a grid of 5 cm, it will render faster, but will begin to lack detail. At any rate, it will render far quicker than the original MXM, since that one was generating far too much displacement height. You can download the modified MXM here.

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Next Limit Team

Ok.. thanks


your gravel looks alot better! still long rendering times

So what I do

- Make a plane with sandbox tools > from scratch > grid 0,025
- Make new material "gravel" in SU
- Apply the mxm to this material
- Apply material onto the plane

ready to render?

Or does it render quicker when I group the plane?

When you use Sandbox Tools > From Scratch, it creates many faces, and puts them in a group. So there is no need to group that again (though it cannot hurt, either), and we are not applying material to groups for speed, but to avoid a current render engine bug which affects per-face displacement assignments. When the bug is fixed, you will be able to apply a displacement material to a single face within a group, but that would not be about render speed, either.

There is one more way to speed up rendering of displacement, and it is not exposed in the plugin: a displacement material can use the so-called "pre-tesselated" mode, where rather than displacing meshes analytically during rendering, the engine pre-processes the meshes, creating millions of tiny displaced triangles. The pre-processing takes some time, but the result renders just as fast as any other geometry. This is not exposed in the plugin, because it uses so much memory as to be virtually unusable in a 32-bit application; the analytical method, on the other hand, while having a substantial CPU cost, requires no extra memory at all.

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Next Limit Team

Hello Jeremy

Thank you! I have it all under control now!

Can I just ask you one more thing? about emitters?


I got the emitters to work in Sketchup by applying a .mxm to a sphere and then choose a IES/EULUMDAT.

So with scene type on none... I get a perfect outlighted cube..

But the only thing is.. - How can I get rid of the direct light of the sphere? I want to create a "beam of light" Just when u have a spot on a house outside in the evening.

Sorry to bother you so much, but youre the only one I can ask


Try to keep it simple