[casey]

Is there any recommended procedure for bringing a 3DS MAX scene made with Maxwell 1.x scene into compliance with Maxwell 2.x? Ie., is it possible to run both .dlr's side-by-side and do a conversion, or do you have to just load everything with Maxwell 1.x, write everything down, close, re-load with 2.x, strip everything out, reassign, etc.?

- Casey

[Mihnea Balta]

1.x scenes should load fine in 2.x, but they will still use the old material. We don't provide a way to convert the legacy materials automatically, but you can make a script which exports them to MXM, creates new layered materials and imports the MXMs into the new materials. If you were using referenced materials before, you don't need to do anything.

The material model is different in 2.x so the renders may not look exactly the same. The exporter makes some adjustments when it exports old materials to get them to look as closely as possible in 2.x, but it's not perfect.

PS: you don't really need to convert existing materials unless you want to tweak them using 2.x features. Otherwise they should render just fine.

[casey]

Hmm. I guess I've got other problems then. I definitely have scenes that load with an unrecognized renderer... since I was a beta tester, I suppose it's possible that they are scenes saved with some interim version between the last official 1.x release and the first official 2.x release.

I'll just redo the assignments. All the _actual_ materials are all MXMs anyway, so it's just a matter of figuring out which file each MAX material pointed to.

Thanks,
- Casey

[Bogdan Coroi]

The renderer has the same classid between 1.x and 2.x so theoretically you shouldn't see an unrecognized renderer. The only way I can think you can get an unrecognized renderer is by not having the .dlr file, but I don't think it's the case. If you can mail us a scene (bogdan.coroi@gmail.com or mihnea.balta@gmail.com), maybe we can be of some help.

[casey]

Now that I know that 1.x scenes are supposed to load in 2.x, I'm almost certain that this is a saved-with-some-beta-version-of-the-exporter problem. I will track it down specifically tomorrow, but I suspect that I will just be able to look back in source code control to an earlier version of the scene saved with an earlier version of the Maxwell plugin, and work from that. If it continues to be a puzzler for some reason, I'll be sure to e-mail

Thanks,
- Casey