Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Hi!
These are some bugs I found.

-The shadding group never appear in the Attribute editor,it is needed to go to the Hypershade to select it.
-Name prefix and render layers are not rendered properly in command line mode. Th renderer render the correct layer but the name given to the folder of the layer is the selected in the maya scene.
-Referenced Render layers are not working fine in command line render
-Variations in Intensity from Skydome or IBL are not exported correctly from Maya,the scene exported is not affected by the changes, always export the same value.
-Maya Crash : When an object has several materials assigned by polygon and the object is set to mode3 (smooth preview) Maya crash, Maya do not crash if the object is not smoothed.
-Wrong naming in the file naming when OpenXR is used, instead of exr use psd, the same for radiance hdr and jp2

Remember I am using Maya 2009 so it is possible in other versions the bugs will not exist.
Can any body check this?

Some improvements I would like to have in next versions, some are only proposals.

-Z-Buffer, How to set up correctly? I prefere the adjustment was automatic, for instance same as far and near or base on Maya scene settings.
-Suport Image Planes or better solution for enviroment background.
-Support procedural maps.
-Availabillity to add a maya -maxwell flag for Output Image Depth in command line.
-Swatches from maxwell shadders are not kept, so the render must be do everytime the scene is opened. I know swatches requires to render the shadder, I wonder if it would be possible to create a fast render (real time or an aproximation with textures) for that. Normally are showed all with a default grey lambert.
-It would be appreciate a global Dispalcement scale in render settings same as global scale or attenuation.
-Better implementation for passes, same way as mental, renderman .
-No limits for values in lights emitters ( instead of that or in case there was any limitation a multiplier will be appreciate)
-It would be possible to export the light shaders from Maxwell Render multylight as MXM? So you could reimport the values from changes in multilight. (I know this is tricky)
-Maya flag for exporting MXS in command line.
-Show a message when there is no space for temporal files
-Availabillity to change the temp directory for temporal files in the maxwell settings.

Jalixko wrote: -The shadding group never appear in the Attribute editor,it is needed to go to the Hypershade to select it.
-Name prefix and render layers are not rendered properly in command line mode. Th renderer render the correct layer but the name given to the folder of the layer is the selected in the maya scene.
-Referenced Render layers are not working fine in command line render
-Maya Crash : When an object has several materials assigned by polygon and the object is set to mode3 (smooth preview) Maya crash, Maya do not crash if the object is not smoothed.
-Availabillity to add a maya -maxwell flag for Output Image Depth in command line.
-It would be appreciate a global Dispalcement scale in render settings same as global scale or attenuation.
-No limits for values in lights emitters ( instead of that or in case there was any limitation a multiplier will be appreciate)
-Availabillity to change the temp directory for temporal files in the maxwell settings

We will look into all these issues for the next build.

Jalixko wrote: -Variations in Intensity from Skydome or IBL are not exported correctly from Maya,the scene exported is not affected by the changes, always export the same value.

I cannot reproduce this. Changing the intensity of the IBL layers and the sky dome changes the rendered image and the value I enter is shown correctly if I export a MXS and open it in Studio. Can you give me more details about this issue?

Jalixko wrote:-Wrong naming in the file naming when OpenXR is used, instead of exr use psd, the same for radiance hdr and jp2

The render globals UI will display the wrong extension in the file name preview field because the extra formats are implemented through a hack (Maya doesn't support adding output formats). However, the file that is produced will have the correct extension, so you can ignore the mismatch from the preview field. It is possible to hack that field and change the text in it, but I'd rather not add even more ugly hacks.

Jalixko wrote: -Swatches from maxwell shadders are not kept, so the render must be do everytime the scene is opened. I know swatches requires to render the shadder, I wonder if it would be possible to create a fast render (real time or an aproximation with textures) for that. Normally are showed all with a default grey lambert.

Maxwell swatches are saved in the .mayaswatches directory when you save the scene, just like regular Maya texture swatches, but with the .mvprev extension. They load correctly when I reopen scenes on my machine. Can you give me more details about this problem?

Jalixko wrote: -Suport Image Planes or better solution for enviroment background.

You can use planar mapping in the IBL background channel. What other features do you need?

Jalixko wrote: -Z-Buffer, How to set up correctly? I prefere the adjustment was automatic, for instance same as far and near or base on Maya scene settings.

We can add a checkbox which will reuse the values from the near and far clipping distances for the active camera. Will this be enough?

Jalixko wrote: -Better implementation for passes, same way as mental, renderman .

What do you mean?

Jalixko wrote: -Support procedural maps.

Baking procedurals automatically was discussed before, but I'd rather not do it because there are lots of options and corner cases that need to be taken into account. Supporting procedurals at the core level would be much better, but that's not up to me.

Jalixko wrote: -It would be possible to export the light shaders from Maxwell Render multylight as MXM? So you could reimport the values from changes in multilight. (I know this is tricky)

We have talked about a solution for reading back the ML slider values after the render is finished and updating the light shaders. It will be implemented at some point, but I don't have an ETA for it (it must be supported in the renderer first).

Jalixko wrote: -Maya flag for exporting MXS in command line.

Without rendering? There's already a flag that lets you export a MXS file when rendering (-mxs), we can add another one which prevents the renderer from being started after the file is exported (I guess you can already do this with MEL, but we can add explicit support for it).

Jalixko wrote: -Show a message when there is no space for temporal files

This is trickier than it sounds, the Maxwell SDK only tells us that writing the MXS has failed, it doesn't say why it failed.

Hi Mihnea!

Jalixko wrote:
-Variations in Intensity from Skydome or IBL are not exported correctly from Maya,the scene exported is not affected by the changes, always export the same value.


I cannot reproduce this. Changing the intensity of the IBL layers and the sky dome changes the rendered image and the value I enter is shown correctly if I export a MXS and open it in Studio. Can you give me more details about this issue?

Sorry, instead of this it could be transfered the values in the IBL into the Maxwell Render multilight?

Jalixko wrote:
-Swatches from maxwell shadders are not kept, so the render must be do everytime the scene is opened. I know swatches requires to render the shadder, I wonder if it would be possible to create a fast render (real time or an aproximation with textures) for that. Normally are showed all with a default grey lambert.


Maxwell swatches are saved in the .mayaswatches directory when you save the scene, just like regular Maya texture swatches, but with the .mvprev extension. They load correctly when I reopen, on my machine. Can you give me more details about this problem?

My extensions are named mxprev, my maya swatches are named like this: SQ08_P05_REN_V22_mb_MORT%3AtieMaxwell.mxprev, I don´t know if the "%" could produce an error in the swatche loading process.
Other cause could be the data structure I am using, we are using several folders in the scene forlder to save the scene by categories, but as far as I know Maya always saves the swatches in the same directory of the scenes, in .folder apart inside the used scene folder.

Jalixko wrote:
-Suport Image Planes or better solution for enviroment background.


You can use planar mapping in the IBL background channel. What other features do you need?

The best solution will be to have the possibility to connect the image planes from cameras to the IBL background, so then we could use sequences instead of stills. This could help for doing previews.

Jalixko wrote:
-Z-Buffer, How to set up correctly? I prefere the adjustment was automatic, for instance same as far and near or base on Maya scene settings.


We can add a checkbox which will reuse the values from the near and far clipping distances for the active camera. Will this be enough?

Yes, this could be a good help. I think the best way will be have all this stuff in the camera attributes as same as Maya where you can set up all thios kind of things and in the render settings to activate or deactivate the pass output.

Jalixko wrote:
-Better implementation for passes, same way as mental, renderman .


What do you mean?

If you have a look to the Mental ray passes you can use it in conjuction wityh Maya render Pasess, so this is a cool way to set up all the passes in a versatil way.

Jalixko wrote:
-Maya flag for exporting MXS in command line.


Without rendering? There's already a flag that lets you export a MXS file when rendering (-mxs), we can add another one which prevents the renderer from being started after the file is exported (I guess you can already do this with MEL, but we can add explicit support for it).

Exactly! I would like to have the option to export MXS by command line without rendering the image, for instance, complex scenes where loading maya scenes and the mxs scene for rendering overflow the memory.

Thanks Mihnea for all your kind support.

Jalixko wrote: Sorry, instead of this it could be transfered the values in the IBL into the Maxwell Render multilight?

Not really, but when we'll add the ability to read back the multilight sliders and adjust the materials, we will also read back the environment sliders and adjust the IBL intensity.

Jalixko wrote:My extensions are named mxprev, my maya swatches are named like this: SQ08_P05_REN_V22_mb_MORT%3AtieMaxwell.mxprev, I don´t know if the "%" could produce an error in the swatche loading process.

It's probably an issue with non-ascii characters in the material name. What's the material called?

Jalixko wrote: The best solution will be to have the possibility to connect the image planes from cameras to the IBL background, so then we could use sequences instead of stills. This could help for doing previews.

I'll look into this.

Jalixko wrote:If you have a look to the Mental ray passes you can use it in conjuction wityh Maya render Pasess, so this is a cool way to set up all the passes in a versatil way.

This is not straightforward because the Maxwell passes work a bit differently compared to mental ray, but I'll have a look.

Jalixko wrote:Exactly! I would like to have the option to export MXS by command line without rendering the image, for instance, complex scenes where loading maya scenes and the mxs scene for rendering overflow the memory.

Ok, will do.

On second thought, the %3a part in the swatch file name represents a colon (not a non-ascii character), which appears when referenced materials are used. There may be an issue with materials from referenced scenes losing their swatches, I'll check.

Mihnea Balta wrote:On second thought, the %3a part in the swatch file name represents a colon (not a non-ascii character), which appears when referenced materials are used. There may be an issue with materials from referenced scenes losing their swatches, I'll check.

Yes, that cpould be the reason, we are using references in all scenes, and is using namespacing, I mean Maya add a ":" between the referenceName and the nodeName

Jalixko wrote: -Maya Crash : When an object has several materials assigned by polygon and the object is set to mode3 (smooth preview) Maya crash, Maya do not crash if the object is not smoothed.

Unfortunately we can't support smoothed meshes with more than one material due to a limitation in the Maya SDK. The next plug-in build will no longer crash when this happens, but it will use the material which is assigned to the largest number of faces on the entire object.

Thanks!