Maxwell Render

Sorry if this ends up being a stupid query but I've put a bunch of time into looking for an answer already here on the forums and from fiddling and testing, and I'm throwing in the towel figuring it out further on my own. All I'm trying to do is make simple repeat-pattern wallpaper for a big rectangular plane wall; just a tiling image on one plane. I wanted the pattern to be a little raised so I have a bump map to go along with my color map, and a roughness map... Problem is, the maps are misaligned from each other and for the life of me I can't get them aligned right. The maps are indeed the same pixel dimensions and all that...

Details of what I did for those interested:
1. I got this wallpaper texturing all perfect as a native LW surface
2. In the Surface editor I added a M~R shader and created a .mxm from said LW surface
3. I edited this new .mxm in the M~R Material editor: I added a couple of more maps for MR native channels (roughness+), set all the native maxwell stuff. In the end it's just a single BSDF layer with little TIF maps (all the same size/res).
It seems very straightforward as far as how to set it up, and in the texture preview it looks fine, but upon rendering an image from the plug-in the maps won't line up correctly. They are each shifted from one another mostly side to side but up and down a little as well. The only ways, in my limited knowledge, I could see this problem happening is from: a) maps being different sizes/resolutions b) maps using different projectors c) maps having different values entered in the "TileX" "TileY" or offsets from one another. None of those are the case. All the maps are all assigned to projector 0, they all having Tile X and Y as "1.0" all have their offsets as "0", etc., and all are in the same BSDF layer. Fiddling in Studio yielded no clues either that I saw. So, what am I missing?

I lost my online place where I do image hosting so I can't show you, but it's easy to for us CG folks to picture something like this: simple raised-pattern wallpaper done in CG where the different maps are horribly mis-aligned.

LW8.3 M~Rv1.1 Thanks for reading!

sorry but this forum is practically dead .. we are all waiting for a new decent plugin to come out, which is not surely to happen soon according to Nl words...but in months... i myself am giving up on this plugin and planning to use 3dmax instead...
.. anyway if there is someone of good will ...perhaps will give u an answer...

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win xp 32- e6600 - lw plugin
vista 64 - i7 2,67 ghz - 8gb ram

Thanks for replying giacob. I'm not the most experienced when it comes to 3D software so I guess I'm part hoping, indeed, that someone will reply with a, "It sounds like you just forgot to ___" and all will be good with this one hurdle. But if not, I'll assume it's a bug and wait for the new plug-in to come out before attempting this specific wallpaper thing again.

Any chance you could post your LW scene file? I'm having no problems with texture tiling, but I am using 9.2. Have you tried 8.5?
giacob, if you have StudioMax, and there is already a more stable plugin, then why dont you use that? I find your constant negative comments to be tiresome, a little assinine, off topic , and counter productive. Just my opinion.

perhaps i am annoying but also changing software is a bit annoying since u have to translate all your library of 3d object .....
the situation in my opinion is negative ditto my comment are negative... but also your comment is just negative and not constructive,,

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win xp 32- e6600 - lw plugin
vista 64 - i7 2,67 ghz - 8gb ram

Well, I was putting together a new tiny scene from scratch to show the problem and guess what: in the new setup it now works, everything is lined up. The process I just did is the same one I did for the bigger scene so I don't know why it doesn't work on the wall in the old big scene and not on the new small, but at least now I know the problem wasn't me missing a step. And loading the new small wall to the old/big scene, it renders fine in that scene too (while the old wall is still messed up in the b.g.). Very strange. I still can't imagine what made the other texture go so misaligned. The only difference was that this new surface was put together very barebones in the LW surface editor (with the intent only to be turned into a Maxwell texture) and the old one was set-up to be a perfect LW surface first. My best guess is that something the shader pulled from the more elaborately defined LW surface is what was causing all those misalignment problems (though I still don't see how -- all the maps were assigned to projector 0...) Anyone ever hear of some parts of LW surfaces causing trouble for auto-creating a .mxm?

So, for the moment, I'm okay again it seems. joshh, thanks for the offer to look at the scene. I wouldn't have tried this route of making a tiny 'example' scene if not for your request. Silly me.

On an aside, my bump map isn't very raised despite being maxed out in contrast with the way the map is drawn (black and white) and being set to 100 in the mat. ed. I seem to recall other people talking about this 'low bumpiness' of bumpmaps on the forums, but while here I'll just ask: Can I get my bumpiness more raised - or does M~R not like raising bumpmaps beyond a very low thickness?

Thanks for reading and responding everyone!

Will- I'm glad you got it working but you still need to know what was causing the problem. Here's some things I can think of - smoothing should be turned off for a flat surface, is your mesh triangulated? are you trying to use cubic mapping (I think there's problems with that) try using targa instead of tiff, try creating a custom uv map instead of just assigning planar mapping.
I also have had hit and miss success with the bump mapping. For me it seems that the bump sometimes is reflecting light from the wrong direction. Maybe this is something they are fixing for the new plugin. Who knows, maybe we are getting displacement? It's true tat they do tease us with update information.

giacob- "...but also your comment is just negative and not constructive,, " hey, it got you to smile, didn't it ?

not at all i am a negative grunting devil who dare to find defects in this fantastic plugin,.. sorry ... not a positive smiling angel as u

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win xp 32- e6600 - lw plugin
vista 64 - i7 2,67 ghz - 8gb ram

Thanks for those tips. I looked and smoothing was off, I was using just planar, not cubic; I hadn't triangulated but I really doubt that had something to do with it (my new surface that works isn't tri'd). I was using TIFs, but I still am in the working .mxm so while I may switch to targa in the future I don't think that was the cause of my ordeal. The only differences that I'm seeing right now were that I had three maps assigned in the old surface (that created the misaligned .mxm) and that they (color, diffuse and bump) all had custom parameters typed in for scale (though all matched prefectly for all three maps). I don't have time right now to start trying to narrow down from that what caused the problem but I likely will. What's weird is that in my trying to fix things on Wed. I swear that one approach I made was to strip away all maps except for color as it seemed to me that the created .mxm was trying to create a separate projector for each LW surface map, and I wanted to force it to create only one projector. Perhaps residuals of those maps that I had deleted were still there somehow? Was weird. Like I said, I will likely try to see if I can issolate it within the next few days.

And I also recall others having problems with bump maps, although some people get fine results. JDhill I think had a thread with a weight set where the bump stuff all looked really good. Plug-in related?

joshh, you only have a couple dozen posts here but you seem to know your stuff. Do you by any chance have a gallery thread up here, somewhere or any examples of your stuff? I'm always interested to see a LW/M~R combo in action. Keeps me inspired.

Will - I think the multiple maps for different properties is what was causing the trouble. You have to make one map per object and make the textures fit the one map. UV mapping has been the hardest thing for me to understand in learning 3D stuff so I always sympathise with others who are having the same kinds of trouble. I shouldn't really be giving advise because I'm no expert and I'd hate to steer you wrong. In fact I'm just a hobbyist and just doodle and test alot so I don't really have anything good to put in a gallery. Here's a test image though which illustrates some of the things we've been talking about,

The pen tip has a custom uv map for the engraving bump texture and the background surface has planar map for the tiled bump texture. If you look at the shadows on the bumping under the eyeball, they seem to be going the wrong direction.

I've been trying to reproduce that misalignment problem that I could not get rid of after hours of trying and take a wild guess what? I can't get it to happen again. Such is life's weirdness sometimes I guess. Very strange.

That's a cool shot of the eye and pen. I see what you mean about the bumpmapping. Everything else seems right on, but something about that ain't workin'.

Side question: With my tif's I get warnings about "Incorrect field count" and such things. Is that one reason to use TGA's instead? Are there other reasons? And unless I'm mistaken, if one shouldn't use tiffs that would pretty much mean that the only image format one should use for M~R is .tga, right (as I heard everything other than tif's and tga's wash out)?