Maxwell Render

Ciao,
i notice a strange behavior when 3d scene goes more complex skypreview disappear (background turns to gray)

This happens both with hdr and maxwell skymodel, and begins when i switch from one to another.

Sky becomes visible again when i point the camera out of scene: so when i see no geometry the background appear again in right way.

Last thing: when backround preview works it shows hdr image with a not correct tiling if U or V offset is different than 0,0.
Btw background tiling becomes correct suddendly if i point the camera target outside geometry in scene.

this behavior affects only max perspective/camera viewport: renders are always ok.




edit: i forget another detail... when sky is not displayed. in some point of view i see a small totally black sphere floating randomly while i pan or rotate the viewpoint.

edit2: before posting i try also some configuration in d3d and openGL viewport driver... but no way. always same results.

edit3: happens with 1.7.4 and 1.7.5 plugin

_________________
http://www.lucafrizzarin.com

Ghost: "Ready..."

Are you sure that switching between HDR and Physical Sky preview is what triggers the wrong behavior?

Could you move all your geometry closer to the center (0, 0, 0 - where the grid is located) and see if the sky continues to disappear? Also, this is related to wrong U, V offsets, too.
As you may have probably noticed, in 3dsmax, when you do your modeling far away (4, 5 mouse wheel scrolls) from the center (0, 0, 0) the geometry and all viewport becomes unstable, due to some floating point errors. The sky is no exception from this unfortunately.


It's not a drivers issue at all. Sky Preview only works with DirectX (as specified in Plug-in updates thread) and switching to OpenGL should disable the sky preview instantaneous.

ok.. that's why in openGL no sky is displayed (sorry i forgot)

Btw model is in center of axis, very near to origin.
if you want i can clean, compress and send one of my scene where sky appears in about 2 hrs.

until now is switching between HDR and Physical Sky preview OR simply turn off/"and on again" preview what triggers wring behavior.

_________________
http://www.lucafrizzarin.com

Ghost: "Ready..."

That would be perfect. Thanks.

i send you 2009max file to your gmailbox
tx

_________________
http://www.lucafrizzarin.com

Ghost: "Ready..."

Received. Thanks. I'll let you know what's going on.

Hi, I have some problems too with sky preview: moving the target of the cam or even the perspective view will make the preview sky desappear sometime. I have to move the cam, even just a bit, to make it reappear.

I'm in DirectX mode with Vista 64 and Max2008.

It's a very good option, very useful... and I think soon I will be upset if I don't see the sky preview with a camera positionned exactly like I want

[EDIT]: Works fine in 3ds Max Design 2009 SP1 x64

i did some tests about how far from origin camera should be... and i noticed that in max 2009 sky works in viewport only when point of view is very (too) near axis origin.

here a sample of one "my daily 3d scene":

i have to render a portion of a city, so my scene fit into a box 500x700 meters. maximum height of 3d scene is 30 meters. this 3d environement is placed at center of axis origin.

if i place the camera in the center of scene (=and axis origin) i see background.

if i move the camera more than 130-140 meters away from axis background disappear. this happens in x, y, and, z.

if i move again camera under this 'limit radius', the sky appears again.

target distance and fov does not affect this strange behaviour. this happens with maxwell sky and hdr background.

i hope these info can help in solving problem.

ciao
Luca

_________________
http://www.lucafrizzarin.com

Ghost: "Ready..."

Notice that when you enable sky preview, there is a new object created called "Maxwell Sky Object"? I believe this object may be a sphere around the scene. I guess this sphere doesn't scale to the max scene limits (I think if it did, this problem wouldn't exist). I have not tried to select this object as I have had no reason to, but maybe it is selectable and scaleable? Let us know if you try it.

_________________
Brian Looney
Maxwell + RealFlow
http://lunatic-studio.com/
Help! I'm dispersing into a haze of probability!

Ciao Bubbaloo, maxwell sky object is selactable (by select by name), movable, scalable and linkable (by schematic view) to camera or other objects. i tried all combinations of scale and linking to camera/camera target..... but always same result.

btw thank you for the hint
ciao
Luca

_________________
http://www.lucafrizzarin.com

Ghost: "Ready..."

See message below...

_________________
Brian Looney
Maxwell + RealFlow
http://lunatic-studio.com/
Help! I'm dispersing into a haze of probability!

Luca, we haven't forgot about this and the report sample scene you've sent me some months ago, but we don't have any results/workarounds on this problem.

The root of evil in that scene is an Editable Spline object (named Shape07). If this object is present in the view/camera and has the Extrude modifier turned ON, it disables our DirectX shader and the sky preview isn't updated in the viewport anymore. If the object is freezed, everything works OK. Unfortunately, we haven't find out yet the relation between the spline objects having an Extrude modifier ON and the sky preview.

i tried with an empty scene (= there's only the maxwell sky obj in scene object list) and this happens also if there is no extrude modifier. If camera distance is greater than radius from origin i explained in previous posts, sky disappear again.

thanks Bogdan for the support, now i stop tests and let you work

tx
ciao
Luca

_________________
http://www.lucafrizzarin.com

Ghost: "Ready..."

Yes, the sky disappears when the camera is far away from origin, we know about it, but we also observed that 3dsMax is behaving strange when creating new objects having the view/camera far from origin. It will not draw them properly or at all, so we conclude that 3dsMax hates us all.

PS. We also tested on a new scene with another Editable spline and Extrude modifier applied and everything worked fine. That particular object makes somehow 3dsMax to act crazy. We'll do our best to fix it.