Maxwell Render

Is this a bug with the plugin?
After setting up a texture in Modeler, one with a clip map for instance, and saving or exporting the mxm, the settings are not the same when imported again. The image map projection switches to planar from the original uv, any invert layer settings are reverted, the mip map settings are switched on and the scale is set back to default. It's a real drag when you have an object like a patch of ivy with maybe a dozen variations of the same texture and have to go in and reset every single image map on each and every one...
Is this a problem with Lightwave or the plugin? I find it faster and easier to do my texturing in Modeler rather than in Studio or Layout.

Any ideas?

Thanks much,
Ron

The invert layer setting is not imported correctly, that's a plug-in bug and it will be fixed in the next version.

Which mip map settings are you referring to?

Unfortunately the projection mode and settings (scale, position etc.) will always be set to planar when importing a MXM. This is because the MXM format does not store data about texture projection, so the plug-in must set some default value.

Thanks for the reply Mihnea,

The mipmap setting is no big deal but texture projection settings not being saved with a material...that seems odd to me.

This is not such a good thing I think...

Maxwell doesn't support projected textures. For example, the LW plug-in computes explicit UVs for all the projected textures in the scene when it exports a MXS file. This is why the MXM format cannot store the projection mode. Besides, there are tiny differences in the way in which different 3D applications implement projection modes, and making the MXM format support all of them would be pretty hard.

Anyway, why do you need to export the material as a MXM? When you save the LWO from Modeler, any existing Maxwell materials will be saved too, so they will be loaded correctly into Layout, including the projection mode and everything. Copy/pasting Maxwell shaders also works, so if you need to transfer a material from one surface to another you can use that instead of export/import.

Yeah, I guess you are right about the copy paste...and actually the easiest way to save all the mxm settings is to just save the whole thing in the texture editor as an .srf in the surfaces library...

DUH!...