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After looking everywhere I still have no solution and the documentation seems outdated says nothing that helps me.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

Could you send me the scene please?

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.

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?

Sent, thanks.

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

What are you using to scatter the proxies?

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)?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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?