Maxwell Render

Hi,
i'm trying to streamline my workflow and by-pass Studio, i'd like to work from LW to Render directly. Main issue are materials, in Lw i dont have texture editing capability i have in maxwell; so i export scene, i extract materials in a folder and i edit them in Material editor.
Problem is when i import MXM back into LW: btw, i lose every texture editing done in Material Editor.
I'd like to *reference* a MXM from LW interface, so it just load a MXM in rendering phase without importing it physically into LW.
Is it possible ? so far, it seems i can just import a MXM but not reference it.


thanks,
Paolo

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Paolo Zambrini
Engram Studio
www.engram.it

Referenced MXM files aren't supported right now because UV assignments can't be specified in a reasonable way. Maxwell materials have a channel index for each texture and expect the mesh to have explicit UVs in it. In contrast, projectors are often used inside LW, and they don't have an equivalent in Maxwell; the plug-in computes explicit UVs from them at export time and assigns channel indices.

It would be possible to support referenced MXM files, but only on meshes which have UV sets. LW projectors are defined inside the texture objects, but there won't be any texture objects when referenced MXMs are involved, so you won't be able to use projectors.

The other issue you're seeing, that color adjustments aren't imported, is because Lightwave doesn't give us access to its built-in adjustment values. The texture objects have all the controls we need, but we can't read or write them. There's also no easy way to add our own controls there.