Maxwell Render

I haven't had any issues with components moving. Ocassionally, I've had components that don't render or have parts that don't render but I don't think it has to do with them moving.

I totally agree about the 2d view. I've been using it all the time now and it's great. Saves me from having to set up the camera in studio

-Brodie

Hi brodie,
thats weird. My components, especially when mirrored using the mirror.rb are misplaced in Studio but ok from SU directly to Maxwell. I have to explode those components to get it right in Studio. I am talking very simple models.
Francois

Interesting. I mirror components fairly regularly, although I do it the ol' fashioned way by hand. I can't imagine why that would make a difference but it might be worth trying for awhile to see if it makes a difference.

-Brodie

Being mindful JD informed me that emitters within mirrored components with result in the light emitting from the reverse normal. Care!

_________________
Move your arse and your mind will follow!

Hi People,

Been taking the new version for a spin lately, checking if it got better... and I must say it does seem so

The UI is better and the export work perfectly for large scenes too so far with not special issues but TWO!

Mirrored components (scaled -1 as i do them) get all messed up when exported directly or opened in studio but are OK when exporting direct to render as already mentioned here before. The thing is the same MXS of the directly exported to render scene once opened in studio is messed up again and rendering it out from there shows the same mess... what a mess haaa?

Also, Hidden objects or layers are not respected and get exported and rendered too.

These are rather major issues no? how many of you encountered the same behavior?

One more thing that is odd is the balloons material... they have white strips that show ok in the directly exported to render image but all red inside studio.

Studio seems crucial for a good SU to Maxwell workflow - this issues must be solved fast.





Ronen

_________________
Ronen Bekerman
Polytown Architectural Visualization
www.polytown.co.il

visit my personal blog at :
www.ronenbekerman.com

Hey Ronen!

Mate have you the latest version of the pluging installed? JD's first version certainly did have issues with hidden geometry and layers rendering! Though he jumped on that pretty quickly and I'm noticing no issues here with that now!

You might check the scene manager to ensure you don't have it set to render hidden objects, this is an on off option!

The flipping issue is certainly something that seems to be born with the new plugin and I would say to be the case with the white stripe in the balloon, though weird it doesn't occur on direct export too! According to JD, maxwell assumes all negatively scaled geometry flips the faces, though it is weird as if you inspect the normals in studio they face the same way yet when rendered out flip the MXM assignment. See emitter issue above!

I'm finding studio still a bit buggy, a render I have running at the moment has an issue that it will on one export accept the emixer file and then next not, weird stuff goes on once studio reads MXS files and that just seems strange!

I would suggest though JD will get it sorted pretty quickly! He seems to be da man!

_________________
Move your arse and your mind will follow!

Hello Ronen, are you using the 2.1.12 plugin linked here? viewtopic.php?f=107&t=35142

Some issues remain with negatively-scaled components, but it should be much better than in the original 2.1.0 release. There is a tradeoff which we must remain conscious of: where it is possible to find issues with negative scaled geometry in Studio now, in many cases previously, it would not have been an issue, because you simply would have run out of memory in SketchUp before the MXS could be exported. Nevertheless, I am working on it.

_________________
Next Limit Team

I sometimes seem to see the setting for the sun switch off in the environment setting when I switch off shadows (just for reasons of speed) in SU from scene to scene. I have to check regularly if the sun remains as set to "on" when I want it to be on at export even when the shadows in SU are back on.

May it has been mentioned before but it would be great if scene names in SU would be coupled to the rendered .jpg and mxs names in the plugin in the output panel.

I might not be very clear in this mail since I am at home and not on SU with Maxwell to check the proper panels.

I tested the proxy' with the proxy.rb and it works very well.

I am doing some tests now for our website and its been a long while since I rendered straight from SU but with the new plugin all seems to go well apart from the flipped scale issue.I haven't used autoMXM anymore and the dialogs for the materials and linking to mxm's is working well for me as well.
Francois

Can it be that using the scene manager to assign mxm's and alter SU materials slows SU down, in the way that I see the rolling pizza now and then for longer then I used to see ?

I haven't had time to test this well yet though.
Francois

Another thing, probably not related specifically to the plugin is the difficulties I have with displacement mappings and SU surfaces. I had a thatched roof that gave me lots of problems. Weird was that two the same sized adjacent surfaces, perfectly square rendered differently. One well and the other with an ugly triangulated curved effect.

It shouldn't, unless you have also copied the MXM's texture into the SketchUp material, and that texture is slowing things down. Let me know if you notice any more specific conditions that I could check.


That would depend heavily on how SketchUp is triangulating each surface -- the only way, really, to check it is to open the MXS in Studio and see what the exported mesh looks like by switching the viewport to Wireframe or Hidden Line.

_________________
Next Limit Team

Hi JD, I think I found a bug.

In the Sky dome dialog in the scene manager the cd/m2 does not do anything, all values translate to a hdri intensity setting of 20 for the white illumination map. The intensity by cd/m2 of the sky dome itself is not set at export.

What I do now is I set the background to image based after I set the skydome to the prefered cd/m2 in the scene manager.
Then the skydome works as set in the scene manager when the model is exported with image based environment activated with all maps disabled.

I found this out testing studiolights for a space without roof with a bit of skydome for general lighting.

Francois
( I am still working straight from SU to Maxwell, after a year of doing Studio. Your plugin is truly marvelous, especially compared to what it was).

Thanks, looking here, the Sky Dome Intensity is indeed set in the MXS (checking in Studio), but it has no effect -- since the Color is set to 'Application', the plugin uses the 2x2 white HDR scheme to emulate the SketchUp environment. If I set the Sky Dome Color to 'Custom', then the plugin simply exports what you specify.

Let me know if this helps to clarify anything. The reason for the possibly-strange behavior when Color=Application is that I use the white HDR trick to give a gradient skydome background that matches somewhat what you see in SketchUp, while not also coloring the illumination of the scene.

_________________
Next Limit Team

ok, clear, Maybe you have to gray out the sky dome intesity fixed at 20 when in application mode. In a hurry I sometimes forget to click the setting from application to custom.
Francois

I downloaded the studio hdr file from the resource site and in Photoshop made it grey, reducing the saturation since the one from the site is very magenta.
When I replace the orioginal hdr file for the one I altered all goes well in Studio and my renders look fine.

But in the plugin I can't asign my .hdr file for some reason. The plugin does not recognize my .hdr file and greys it out when I try to choose it. The original from the site can be choosen though.

Any idea why and how to overcome this problem ?
Francois