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Error: No object matches name: maxwellRenderOptions.renderTime

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I have a vehicle that is referenced by a bunch of animations.

When I try to render in Maxwell through Maya I get the error message above.

Actaully I get it when I try to look at one of the Render Settings tabs -- not the Common one, but the Maxwell Render one.

It comes up blank and I get the error

Did the plug-in load? Try running this command: maxwellCreateGlobalNodes.

I will try it when I'm back at the office; thanks.

The plugin loaded, I believe, because I was offered Maxwell as one of the render choices in the pulldown, and the maxwell 'Common' tab seemed ok.

maxwellCreateGlobalNodes

wasn't found.

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I did a scene file cleanup on this. I wonder if I got rid of something important.

Scenes on the same computer in a different folder work fine, so I know there isn't something wrong with Maxwell on my machine. The problem is with a particular set of files.

I think the problem is this File > Optimize Scene SIze command I ran on them.

Fortunately I have original versions.

I'll backtrack.

jfrancis wrote:maxwellCreateGlobalNodes

wasn't found.

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I found it.

Lower case m needed.

It didn't seem to solve the problem, though.

Okay, I looked at the Maya ascii file.

It said

requires 2.0.33

I changed it to

requires 2.0.36

It also said

createNode unknown -n -s "maxwellRenderOptions"

I replaced 'unkown' with 'maxwellRenderOptions'

createNode maxwellRenderOptions -n -s "maxwellRenderOptions"

and it seems to be working.

My theory is this -- the file made a round trip, at one point passing through a Maya system with no Maxwell plugin.

I started some work on a Maya file using Maxwell shaders.

The work was sent to animators who rigged the file and animated it. They disregarded the Maxwell shaders and attached some shaders of their own.

The animators don't have Maxwell, so when they saved the Maya scene file, certain things like

createNode maxwellRenderOptions -n -s "maxwellRenderOptions"

became

createNode unknown -n -s "maxwellRenderOptions"

and that's where my trouble began.

Yes, that's most likely what happened. Maya normally preserves the type information when a plug-in cannot be found (it shouldn't replace "maxwellRenderOptions" with "unknown") but that system is pretty fragile and it failed in this case.

I have a new problem:

The scene is tracked in Matchmover and rendered in Mental Ray. I'm converting it back to Maxwell.

The whole scene is blurry, but I can't address the focus / DOF / distance / aperture issues on the camera because the whole Maxwell-specific tab is missing from the camera.

I guess I'll try creating a new camera and parenting it to the other one.

jfrancis wrote:
I guess I'll try creating a new camera and parenting it to the other one.

The new camera is coming in equally devoid of a Maxwell section.

jfrancis wrote:

jfrancis wrote:
I guess I'll try creating a new camera and parenting it to the other one.

The new camera is coming in equally devoid of a Maxwell section.

I created a new camera in a fresh start, thinking I could try and import it into the problem scene.

The camera was born fine. I exported the scene. I opened the problem file to see if I could impoirt the scene with the good camera -

and there was no need. This time the old problem camera had a Maxwell tab.

Sometimes it helps to kill the AE and open it again, so that it gets rebuilt properly. If it's embedded in the main Maya window, hide it and then run this script:
Reopen it and it should have all the controls. If you're using a floating AE window, run this script instead:
Simply closing the AE or displaying the channel box instead of it won't work, that only hides the window and doesn't trigger a rebuild.

Re Maya 2011 new plugin --

http://www.maxwellrender.com/news/updat ... 0_maya.php

I'm curious what exactly "Added a referenced MXM material" mean. We materrials not working with referenced scenes before? I have references in my 2010 work. Should I expect some problems with that?

No, no problem, because referenced material is a new material type, named Maxwell Ref Material, that has a link to an external MXM file and all the editing is done in MXED.