[jimminy]

I set up a scene with some proxies in 3ds max today using the quad menu, create a maxwell proxy, and scattered it around. It seemed to work ok, but at some point, I don't think I changed any setting, but no proxies showed up in the render window any more.

I've been trying all day to get it to work again but no luck, no object I turn into a proxy shows up in the render.

After looking everywhere I still have no solution and the documentation seems outdated says nothing that helps me.

Since it seems to have worked and then stopped, I assume it works, but I'm lost.

[Mihnea Balta]

Could you send me the scene please?

[jimminy]

What, the MAX file? I guess the MAX file, there's nothing in the MXS, the proxy doesn't come in. Let me know where and I'll send it.

At the risk of muddying the issue, I notice that opacity maps on MAX materials don't translate either though it's an easy fix in Studio.

[Mihnea Balta]

Yes, the MAX file. If it's small enough, please mail it to mihnea.balta@gmail.com. If not, please use a file hosting service such as yousendit.

Opacity maps seem to work fine here. Could you also send me a MAX file which exhibits the issue?

[jimminy]

Sent, thanks.

[jimminy]

Disregard the first MAX file, I sent the wrong one. I re-sent with the correct one.

[Bogdan Coroi]

What are you using to scatter the proxies?

[Mihnea Balta]

The scene you've sent contains 5 objects: MxProxyObject001, MxProxyObject002, Plane001, roots2 and Sphere001. The two proxies render OK as far as I can tell, but I suppose you wanted to scatter them on the terrain mesh. However, the method you used for scattering didn't produce any objects.

Do you see more than 5 objects in the Select From Scene dialog on your computer (the one which appears when you press H)?

[jimminy]

I fixed this issue by arbitrarily turning off motion blur in the render options. Don't know why I even tried it but did and just got lucky.

I was using advanced painter to scatter.

I'm having a similar problem now with the demo for Itoo Forest but it's probably a different issue, motion blur doesn't fix it.

In that one the original object and its proxy renders, but the forest doesn't. I don't knows why at this point, it shows the resulting forest as point clouds in MAX, but they don't show up in Maxwell render. Maybe that it's a demo.

[jimminy]

So what about opacity maps? It should simply get passed into the opacity/mask slot in the maxwell material but doesn't seem to make it there for some reason.

[Mihnea Balta]

If you mean the opacity slot in the standard material, that part of the translator hasn't been updated in a while, so it's using the Maxwell 1.x method of doing opacity, which no longer works. We'll bring it up to date in a future update, but it's better to just use Maxwell materials. The standard material offers very little control and fairly poor approximations compared to the Maxwell material.

[jimminy]

ok, got it.

Is it possible to use the max particle system to scatter maxwell proxy objects? Been testing that, but when I render to maxwell I get the MxProxyObject preview box (bounding box) scattered around but not the the thing the proxy is representing. So if I made an MxProxy of a tree, rather than getting a bunch of trees I get a bunch of boxes.

[Mihnea Balta]

You can scatter proxies with PFlow by using a "Shape Instance" node instead of the regular "Shape" node inside the events. Legacy particle systems like blizzard, spray etc. don't work because they don't generate instances, they try to build a unified mesh (and they end up with boxes because the proxies don't give them the real mesh).

[Fernando Tella]

You can scatter instances of proxies with the object painter too (from the ribbon).

[jimminy]

Thanks for the tips.

Minhea: I'm currently using a shape instance node, not shape. Any other ideas?

Fernando: There are a lot of ways to paint objects, scripts and such, but that process is cumbersome when you want to cover a large area with thousands of proxies. I haven't used the Max painter much, is there a way to have it cover an object or do you have to "paint" it on?