[digital_nomad]

Really...could I be this incompetent?

Can someone please kindly explain the 3DS Max scale to Maxwell scale conversion? My renders are way to dark.

Given the following:

In Max, if the System Unit Setup is set in Meters and Display Unit Scale in Centimeters what should the Maxwell Scale be set to?

If the System Unit Setup is set in Meters and Display Unit Scale in Meters what should the Maxwell Scale be set to?

If the System Unit Setup is set in Feet and Display Unit Scale in Inches what should the Maxwell Scale be set to?

If the System Unit Setup is set in Feet and Display Unit Scale in Feet what should the Maxwell Scale be set to?

I feel so embarrased asking the question, but not as much as I am frustrated.

Thanks in advance.
-how

[Mihnea Balta]

The plug-in takes care of unit conversions automatically. The global scale setting is there only for people who don't have scenes modeled to scale. That factor gets applied after the unit conversion, so if your scene is modeled correctly, you should leave it at 1.

Going into more details, the display unit doesn't matter at all. That's just something Max uses for UI. When you change that, nothing changes in the positions of the vertices, cameras etc. Those things are expressed in the system unit, so the plug-in scales them by a factor which transforms from the system unit to meters, because Maxwell always expects meters. For example, if the system unit is centimeters, the plug-in will divide all the positions by 100 on export, to obtain meters.

[digital_nomad]

Hey Mihnea.

Thanks for your reply. It has been quite some time since I have used Maxwell and finally am having a chance to use version 2.0. It seems as if my scene had materials from 1.1 and some other issues that I was able to resolve.

I appreciate the immediate and detailed feedback.

Thanks.
-how