Maxwell Render

Opening a thread to propose what would be hot and really cool to get next time.

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Architecture on it's way

Here we go:

Ok,

1/ Including all features that are making material editing and having the visual feedback directly in softimage are welcome.

2/ Camera improvment. Maybe creating a maxwell camera with shifting and all options relative to maxwell (Zclip) as a standard would be cool. One thing that particularly disturb me in xsi is that you can't get camera option like 30mm (you always have an angle measurment instead)

3/ Last but maybe the most complicated would be to get maxwell able to work in the pass system from xsi. It seems that right now you can define a pass with maxwell as a rendered image. You can composite thus maxwell image through the FXtree with for exemple a wireframe image.
Having acces to mxi image here and getting maxwell "ops" to adjust iso, lights etc would be amazing

Bonus: would it be possible, but it here more belongs to mawxell than to xsi to have the ability to define a material for the cut (zclip) part so they do not appear empty? Then rendering it as a "pass" then i'm happy

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Architecture on it's way

The current XSI plug-in SDK is too limited to allow us to build a material editor inside XSI, like the other plug-ins have. However, we're talking to Softimage about what we would need and probably the next XSI version will be more flexible in this respect and will allow us to have embedded materials.



I'm not sure I follow you here. The native XSI camera has Z clipping and film offset (well, they call it "optical center shift") and those are visible in the viewport and are used by Maxwell. It also lets you specify focal length in millimeters, not as an angle of view, and film size. The focal length, film size and and film offset features can be used by enabling the projection plane on the camera.

Maxwell-specific camera attributes are added to the camera object when you select it the first time. They are related to exposure and diaphragm type so they can't be previewed in the viewport even if we make a Maxwell-specific camera.



We plan to integrate Maxwell as closely as possible with the compositor module, but I don't have an ETA for this feature yet.



As you already said, this is a renderer feature request, not a plug-in request. :) It has been asked already, but I don't know its status. I can't find a thread for it in the wishlist forum, you could post it there to get better feedback.

sorry for n°2,

makes a while i didn't play with xsi, so i don't remember everything. Anyway, i tought it was different from maxwell's one.

Concerning materials too bad for sdk, but i think that's the main feature you should concentrate on. being able to build materials in xsi will be really cool.

I've forget to add xsi materials conversion (arch mat) because i saw a lot of people asking for that. While i don't understand really why (does mentalray convert simple lambert into arch mat?), seems to be a request from a lot of people. What maybe would be needed is a button that convert all materials to mxm by transfering simple parameters (name, diffuse (color and map),reflexion, refraction) so that they can afterward work again on the new mxm materiels to go further with maxwell.

I'm quite surprized from the overall quality of the plugin, since i wait for it that's a good surprise.

a+

edit: when you talk about xsi version, you talk about xsi or maxwell plugin for xsi?

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Architecture on it's way

I'm talking about XSI, they have to make modifications inside the application itself to allow the things we need. We don't know if that's going to happen in 6.1, 7.0 or whatever, at the moment I guess they're collecting feedback from the people who are trying to use the new renderer integration stuff.

We could translate architectural materials automatically on export (like we do for Lambert, Phong etc. right now) and also provide a way to save them as MXM files (or convert them to embedded Maxwell materials, when these will be added). We need to look into this to see how to perform the parameter conversion.

Ok,

When you do Ctrl+7 you access xsi material manager. something cool would be to build a standard maxwell mat library (the one in material database) with little icons that we could load (part of the plugin?).

I'm not sure, but i think it will help most people making the move in xsi to have a good base to start playing and see maxwell's potential .

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Architecture on it's way

Hi Mihnea

Have loads of things that I'll list later but on the *arch* shader note would it take you guys long to sort this? we are not after a like for like conversion just the UV/texture info so this can be used with maxwell.

Also once the scene data has been exported for a render can you fix so you don't have to export each time you re-render a set-up? if it just exported changed data then it would save loads of time.

Would be helpful to maybe have sort sort of paths feature in mat editor so you could set that to you XSI folder rather than keep jumping from folder to folder etc

There's also an issue with UV *not enuff for material* on some objects, i'll post more on this later

Thanks

After using this and understanding more the workflow it's a good start!