Maxwell Render

yes, a fire benchmark would be helpful!

This may be somewhere I haven't found:

Ability, posiibly by right-click, to choose which materials to render to the Shadow Channel. Right now I export to Studio and choose there.

Is there any way to do this?

Right now, you'd need to use an MXM with Shadow enabled.

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Next Limit Team

A way of clearing all Maxwell Object Parameters..... ?
(I am mostly referring to the "hide from" parameters...)

I often have to hide specific things from Camera/GI just for a specific shot, but then I forget about it! (Especially is the group was buried inside other groups...)

Maybe.... ?

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-Gui

[ http://www.gtalarico.com ]

No problem, the next update will have a new Reset All Parameters item at the bottom of the context menu; it resets params for the currently-selected entities, and optionally, any entities they contain, recursively.

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Next Limit Team

I guess I found the reason for this behavior.
If Fire is started, locked, closed and restarted, it will still be locked although the Lock-icon says "unlocked".
To get it back on track, you'll have to lock and then unlock to actually unlock the connection between the SketchUp-camera and Fire...
/Stefan

Ah, nice catch -- I'll check it out.

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Next Limit Team

Tks JD!

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-Gui

[ http://www.gtalarico.com ]

Hi JD,
when i use photo match to texture a model i get thousands of individual MXMs with separated textures, even when i assign a MXM to the sketchup material.
Would it be possible to avoid this behavior and export only one material with the complete photo as texture?

So the material is in mxm mode?
Do you mean multiple mxms, or multiple textures?

Right click the group, and under Maxwell, the uv, click on ignore distortion....?
That's has solved my problem in the past...

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-Gui

[ http://www.gtalarico.com ]

Yes, that should do it, as long as there isn't too much distortion in the SketchUp textures. When there is, UVs won't match up, and you will need to let a separate Maxwell material get generated for each face.

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Next Limit Team

Sorry for the late reply and thank you both for the hint!
Yes, disabling distortion works for not too heavy stretched textures but for some projected photos it doesn't fit... i have reduced the polycount on these objects and will let it export seperately...

And btw. disabling distortion is also needed for Fredo's fabulous Thrupaint plugin - otherwise the result is the same like with projected photos.

The main question is whether you have to use an MXM or not. If you have two faces, each with the same material, but each with different texture distortion (e.g. using right-click > Texture > Position), these will be problematic for use with an MXM. Why? Because the projection shown by SketchUp is not done purely with UV coordinates; it also involves distortion of bitmap pixels.

Try an experiment to demonstrate this: draw two faces, assign one textured material to both (not MXM), position the texture of one of the faces (making sure to skew it, not just scale/rotate/offset), and then export to Studio. You will find that you have two faces with two different materials -- check what they use in their BSDF > Reflectance 0° textures. While the material applied to the undistorted face uses the natural texture, as it exists on disk, the distorted face uses a different texture, whose pixels have actually been changed and written to disk, by SketchUp, at the request of the plugin.

At this point, were you to assign either material to both faces, one of them would appear to be mapped incorrectly. And there is the problem with distorted textures vs. MXM materials: you need a separate material for each distorted face, using uniquely-distorted versions of its textures; there is no way to create these modified textures when you are using MXMs, since SketchUp knows nothing about the many different texture files that may be referenced by that MXM.

However, as mentioned above, if the distortion is small, then using the Ignore Distortion switch may get you close enough. Note as well that none of this applies to the use of embedded-mode materials, since the plugin will happily write out a unique material to go with each uniquely-distorted texture.

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Next Limit Team

thanks for the explanation! How is this working for other plugins like c4d or max when i have a texture that is camera mapped? Will it export as seperated materials too like in sketchup? Or is this working different?
It would be nice if there were a global switch to enable "ignore distortion" for the whole model.

I have a question concerning the layer assignment on export...
When i have a group or component included in another group (or component) in maxwell the object is placed on the layer of the innermost group, right?
So when i have the inner groups on layer0 and a different layer assigned to the whole group containing all the groups on layer0 the result will be layer0 and not the the assigned layer.
Would it be possible to treat layer0 as something special like it is in sketchup (and in acad for instance too) and place an object only on layer0 when there is no other layer definition in a higher or lower group or component?
I don't know how others think about it, but in my workflow sometimes it's much easier and less confusing to let layer0 be assigned to the groups or components that i want to combine and place the whole group on a different layer.
But in maxwell layer0 will be assigend to all these elements.