Maxwell Render

Hi,

I'm on 2008 x64 sp4.0 in vista64. I'm writing an mxs file at the moment from an assembly with 10,000 parts. It's taking a really really long time!

I start the export almost 2 hours ago and the log viewer line number is only at 1800. So I'm estimating another 8 hours to export. Is there something I can do to speed this up. On the other hand I'm really glad that my noon deadline got moved.

Thanks,

Kandor

There are a few things:

- make sure 'Export SW Multi-Materials' is turned off
- whenever possible, make sure none of your bodies have multi-materials enabled
- wherever possible, assign an explicit Maxwell material at the component-level
- turn off the option 'Verbose Messages' - you may find it surprising, but having code transition from processing loops to printing to the UI takes an amazing amount of time. You may even see up to around 25% time savings on the export, though you will have no way of monitoring the progress
- if it works, enable the 'Export Duplicate Bodies as Instances' option. Parts may end up in wrong locations with this though, so you would need to test it first and switch back to 'Export Absolute Coords' if the constraints in the assembly cause problems

If all of these things were false, and you were able to make them all true, I could expect that you may turn a ten-minute export into a ten-second one. The plugin just does whatever you tell it to do - if you tell it to do alot of work (i.e. generating materials, doing lots of lookups for multi-material faces, etc.), then you can expect to pay for that work in processor time.

Let me know if it helps,

JD

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Next Limit Team

Thanks JD,

The next salient question is - can I cancel an mxs export?

Thanks,

Kandor

Sure, hold down CTRL+SHIFT+ALT - when it moves to exporting the next body, it will ask if you want to cancel, or it will just cancel if you have 'Suppress Warnings' enabled.

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Next Limit Team

Nice, thanks!

Did you manage to tweak this b-kandor?

I have a similar problem, but I only have 450 parts, with 3000 bodies in total. However, MXS export is extremely slow. I guess this animation I'm doing won't be rendered in maxwell, from solidworks..

I suppose cash meshes could help me here though, then waiting once or twice for a 10 minute export wouldn't be so bad.

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industrial design and visualization (http://www.syse.se)

Which version of the plugin are you using?

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Next Limit Team

The 2.0.6 preview one.

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industrial design and visualization (http://www.syse.se)

Have you tried enabling Instances in Output > Export? The effectiveness of that will depend on a few factors, which determine what can or cannot be an instance's source mesh. Parts in an assembly can all be exported as instances, since that is what they are in SolidWorks. If there is a material applied to a part at the component level, however, then it can't be used as an instance source, since that would prevent other instances from having multi-materials, if the part has them. Also, a part which has an emitter material may not be an instance, or the source for other instances, as this is not allowed in the engine. Note as well, that there is a problem in maxwell.exe 2.0.3 regarding multi-materials vs. instances, so if you enable instances, you'll need to make sure that you are not using multi-materials; you can either ensure body-by-body that they do not have their multi-material flag enabled (consult the plugin's Object Properties page), or disable the Multi-materials option in Output > Export.

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Next Limit Team

Ok, cool, thanks for all insight info!

I did have instances on, and multimaterials checkbox was not checked, which I should interpret as it being OFF I suppose?

Actually, there were no material applied whatsoever, only photoworsks such. I used the default override material thing,.

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industrial design and visualization (http://www.syse.se)

Yes, Multi-materials will not be exported if the box is not checked.

If you open the log viewer during export, do you see it reporting instances being exported, or not? You could check in Studio too to see what's exported. Also, make sure you don't have Image Quality set too high in your SolidWorks document properties; that controls the mesh density -- any more detail than necessary for the render is just a waste of time.

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Next Limit Team