Maxwell Render

No posts here for a long time? What's going on with you guys and gals, isn't anyone trying to do something with V1?

Lets talk about it at least...come on, talk a little.

Cheers, Ron

I coulnd't make the new plugin to work... it doesn't recognize the MXM files... the only thing it does is grab the color, transparency and other channels from LW itself but no new materials.. nothing that I do makes them stick. frustrating.

For now, I've given up on the LW plug-in............waiting for full 64-bit support before I try again.
To be honest, I don't think the plug-in would make my life easier anyway, porting .lwo's straight from modeler is working sweetly for me, so if it ain't broke I'm not going to try fix it.

_________________
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit......

Markps,
Yeah I know how that goes. But the plugin IS being worked on as we speak so don't get too frustrated. I was very frustrated for a while but I've been using Studio more and getting used to it. I use the plugin to create MXS files and do all the texturing and MXM creating in Studio. Glebe has a system that is working well too. If you would like either one of us can give you some discriptions of how we are working it. Let us know...right glebe?

Cheers, Ron

Every once in a while I get the MXMs that refuse to stick, but mostly not, and not often enough for me to figure out what's causing it. I kind of sprawl everywhere and work in the place that fits what I'm doing.

For most setup and texturing, I just use LW -- and NewTek has said that beta folks can talk about 9 now, so that's what I'm using! I've made a couple special preview scenes to use in the Maxwell external material editor so I can test things like volume attenuation.

I use Studio mostly when I want control over the sunlight or when I want to do minor tweaks. So far, things are working mostly perfectly.

_________________
Zak Jarvis
www.voidmonster.com

Sure no problem, recently I've been thinking about doing a quick 'LW-plugin bypass' tutorial but time is against me at the mo'...

_________________
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit......

Right... what do you do when you have to change 20 objects on the scene? What do you do when you need to use cloth or even the IK from lightwave? Do you freeze the objects and export them...? As far as I know the studio is just an object VIEWER it has NO features from the LW modeler or LW layout.

Without the plugin it is useless for sure.

The anoying thing is that MXM materials were working before.. but then you had the problem of triangulating everything... now that they've fixed the triangulation problem the materials are not working what is the problem with them don't they test anything?

It is obvious that the new plugin is simply a broken build. Give me the SDK that I'll write the plugin myself! Just don't hold that SDK back anymore let the users come up the the solutions since they can't deliver.

For me the only materials that worked were in Beta, I didn't do any on the other iterations and quite using the program all together for a couple months. With V1.0 I also hated it at first and nothing worked for me initially. Right now though I like it much better than Beta, way more powerful. Markps, you should talk to glebe, he's better at discribing what he does by bypassing the plugin all together. Esentially you set up one big object file with each surface on a seperate layer and take it right into Studio and do your texturing there. He can give you the details.
I am not clear what you mean about cloth or IK...are you talking animation?
Studio is way more than an object viewer but you are right it none of Lightwaves features, but it does have it's own. You can adjust or move objects in the scene, adjust the camera etc. It is it's own program and has it's own functions. But again, I am not sure what you mean here, are you saying Studio should have features from Layout and/or modeler?

Ron

I have 50 objects in one scene... And I'm always adjusting them.. And they are copied several times so to make them one object doesn't work. And it is non sense to change every copy (for example.. one bolt has 150 copies on screen if I want to change the bolt to flat head I would have to re-position or change it 150 times... non sense.

Another thing is the LW main program has Inverse Knematics and Rigging so you can use bones to pose the characters and morphs to change specific characteristics (like an egg spreadding on the floor), etc... I'm not talking about animation I'm talking about morphing and posing objects what lightwave took several years to develop this capability.

Cloth is another technique that works wonderfully in light wave... if you have a table cloth you can give it gravity and you don't need to worry about the wrinkles it does it by itself.. but to have to freeze the object and work with several stages of morphing is ridiculus.

The plugin is the ONLY way to work.. but it seems that the only problem with the plugin is the material assignment it doesn't seem to be too hard to tell that surface X is assigned to X.MXM Duh! It is like a huge software that they forgot to write the last line of code. That's what agravates me.

Hi guys, well it sounds like for you [mark] you really do need a fully functional plug-in, changing multiple data-sets and using ik/cloth etc 'on the fly' just ain't gonna happen right now.

Yes you have to 'save as transformed' everything and re-configure your lwo's if you want perfect stability [my prefered route] and if you're doing lots of changes/variations that'll be a real pain.

That said, I don't even think about MWR rendering until the job is done, optimizing for MWR is done when the client has signed off the model.........bypassing the plugin is saving me a LOT of time when you consider the bugs/inconsistencies that need to be addressed with the other route.

_________________
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit......

Why are you always changing the objects?
Do you need multiple variations or is it part of a fluid design process?

If I know a job will require MWR then I forget about cloned objects and work only with primary data........in the end all 'steel' material will end up on one layer, glass another etc.

Studio: Is indeed way more than a viewer, it really pays to spend some time with it and explore its capabilities. It is totally solid, I haven't had a crash since v1 came out.

_________________
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit......

Globe, you seem to be in love with the studio... But you have to agree with me.. it is just for texturing and maping... it may be full of features.. I've tried setting up the focal distance in the studio with autofocus, etc... It is a pain..! Setting the focal distance in LW takes 3 seconds! But that's not the case.

My point is if you keep pointing out here how you DO NOT use the plugin and you are just fine... Well, you seem to be the only one.. because the Lightwave area of this Forum is dead.

Why are we seeing 100 times more images from 3ds Max? well because their plugin works.

When you come up with these "solutions" of separating hundreds of sufaces in layers and exporting it only on the final stage (no further changes allowed) and etc. people may thing that you are on to something here. That's not helping us much. The plugin just has a few bugs, but with these few bugs makes it unusable. If they spend a week's worth of work on it I bet it would be golden for ALL OF US LW users.

Hi Mark, well hopefully we can inject a bit more 'life' into the LW debate.

'Love' is a bit strong but yes I'm getting workable results with very little lost time with my workaround, obviously it depends on your particular situation/type of work, it's all horses for courses.
Yes it would be great to able to do everything from within LW but that just ain't possible right now........rather than bang my head against a wall I needed to be up and running asap and this is the only way right now.

Focal distance is just a seasy in Studio, don't understand your problem there........it's just 6 numeric boxes, us Lightwvers are pretty used to those......it's just as quick in Studio once you've got used to it.

I didn't say 'no further changes', once you've got your layers mapped it's easy to adjust the few that will need amending, you can even isolate those layers in a new model and just import them again, they will auto-replace the outdated layers.

I think the high functionality you want from the plug-in is more complex to solve, we are only at v1.0 after all.........I bet there's functions in Max that aren't supported either.

Rather than trying to make MWR work the way we've become used to, we have to figure out how MWR works NOW and adjust our practices to suit, this IMHO is the only way to use it for production at present, but that's always been the way with new technologies.

_________________
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit......

exactly! That was my question already a long long time ago but the the NL guys told me that this wasn't true. I think the LW plugin is not as good as the Max one.

_________________
F. Peters Cyberfish