Maxwell Render

first of all, it's great to see Fire working inside 401! it's really nice to see Fire in place of modo's native Preview Render and i'm looking forward to seeing the improved integration with the new 501 SDK. a couple of things though:

1. when the Maxwell plugin is installed, it messes up my config file. it doesn't change it technically, but it does make the code one big block of text, so it's impossible to go in and make manual changes.

2. i had a problem with exporting a file that had IBL. i had several HDRIs in the environment slot (some visible, some not) but the plugin refused to work until i had deleted them all and replaced with the standard modo environment.

3. how do UVs work (bit of a noob here)? am i right in saying that Maxwell supports only 1 UV per object? (or is it 1 UV map for the whole scene?)

4. i'm getting a crash at the moment when clicking the 'Reload' button. scene is pretty simple - one car in on a plane (around 1/2million polys). will look into this a bit more.

looking forward to exploring it further...

Hello Sandros,

Thanks for your comments.

Could you give me you computer specs? (Windows or Mac, number of cores, etc.)

1. Please reopen modo, and quit it. Check you config file. Is it still corrupt?

2. Does the normal render work well with you IBL scene (or is it just the interactive engine)?

3. Maxwell supports up to 255 UVs per object, and also the plug-in exports modo object with multiple UV maps. If you have problem with UVs, please try to describe it, and I will help you how to solve it.

4. Does it happen with all of your scenes?

Márton

thanks for the quick reply.


Windows 7
i7 980x (HT on so 6 core/12 thread)
12GB RAM
modo 401
MR 2.5
Plugin version 2.5


yes. tried several times but there is no change


well i tried on a fresh scene and it works fine, even with multiple HDRI environs. it may have something to do with the point below.


see attached image. when exporting a scene with multiple UV sets, i can export to Studio but when i hit render i get the errors shown. Fire sometimes works, sometimes doesn't in these cases. if i create only one UV set for all items in the scene then all is well.

FYI i've just tried to export some models that ship with modo (with multiple and reasonably complex UV sets) and it works fine so it is probably something that i'm doing wrong.

Thanks for your answers.

1. Could you please send me your config file? (only if it is not a problem for you) - I would like to check what has gone wrong.

2. It would be also a great help if you could send me the scene with the IBL problem.

3. I afraid the error message you get inside Studio, is probably because of a studio bug. If you start the same scene directly from modo it should run fine.
Scenes with items with multiple uv maps are sometimes tricky. The problem is, it is not easy to connect modo UV map information to Maxwell UVs, because the internal UV handling logic is different. If you don't use mxm replacement materials, you can set "Channel ID assignment" to "Automatic" (you can do it at the Texture Locator settings of the plug-in), but if you have mxm replacement materials, you have to be sure that Texture Locator in modo gets the same channel id from the plug-in (if you switch from automatic to manual mode you can set it directly), what you have inside your mxm material.

Márton

of course i can send my config - where to? also, the main config calls some custom configs stored elsewhere that affect the main one. do you need these too? i will also send the IBL scene.


i will have to look into this and try to understand it better.

thanks for the help.