[PaZ]

Hello,
i find LW plugin quite pleasant to work with, Maxwell has entered nicely in our production pipeline. Congrats !
But i've two important questions to ask:
- LW instancing support. LW 11 sdk has been built so it can easily feed instancing info to any engine, so i think it's not a too difficult task and it would make thinbgs much better/easier
- MXED support into LW. Best workflow, by far, is working totally into host app, preview in FIRE and then send render to network. We never use Studio if not for specific tasks. Biggest limitation into LW is Maxwell Shader. It's based upon LW layers so it has not all contrast/gamma/UV controls we get in maxwell editor - and as you know it's crucial to tweak each single texture to get desired result. Now, if i need a slightly brighter texture in reflectance 90°, i've toedit texture in photoshop, sve it and load it. No way. So i think it would be better to have another option, a shader which directly opens MXED with its own GUI. Another solution is referencing: the shader could just point to a saved file, and we could edit it with MXED (without having it integrated into LW). BTW latter solution is worse

thanks,
Paolo

[Mihnea Balta]

- LW instancing support. LW 11 sdk has been built so it can easily feed instancing info to any engine, so i think it's not a too difficult task and it would make thinbgs much better/easier

This is coming soon.

- MXED support into LW.

This is difficult because Lightwave uses projectors a lot, while MXED can only use UV maps. It's not possible to define projectors in MXED, so this would limit you to using UV maps on the Lightwave side. We've thought about it many times, but we haven't found an acceptable solution so far.

We have been thinking about adding support for the image correction controls in LW, but unfortunately the Lightwave SDK does not give us access to these texture parameters. The other option would be to add more stuff to the layered material UI, like a button below every texturable attribute which opens a panel with brightness/contrast/saturation settings. However, this would make the panel pretty big, so it's not a very good approach either. We'll revisit the issue soon, it may be possible to add the adjustments button next to the T buttons, instead of below.

[PaZ]

This is coming soon.

very nice

This is difficult because Lightwave uses projectors a lot, while MXED can only use UV maps. It's not possible to define projectors in MXED, so this would limit you to using UV maps on the Lightwave side. We've thought about it many times, but we haven't found an acceptable solution so far.

an option, for now, could be just doing like you say: just use UVmaps. if we dont want to, we simply use current shader (which should remain there anyway). In case we need deeper control on texture look, we put some efforts on UV making and so we use MXED.

We have been thinking about adding support for the image correction controls in LW, but unfortunately the Lightwave SDK does not give us access to these texture parameters. The other option would be to add more stuff to the layered material UI, like a button below every texturable attribute which opens a panel with brightness/contrast/saturation settings. However, this would make the panel pretty big, so it's not a very good approach either. We'll revisit the issue soon, it may be possible to add the adjustments button next to the T buttons, instead of below.

if this is possible, this would solve.
Anyway, should i pass your SDK request to lw beta team ?

bye
Paolo

[Mihnea Balta]

Anyway, should i pass your SDK request to lw beta team ?

Well, yeah, if you can talk to someone at NewTek, ask them if they can expose the texture adjustments they have in the edit panel in the SDK. That would be the missing piece for exposing all the MXED features directly in LW.

[PaZ]

done, i'll let you know !

Paolo

[PaZ]

I posted the request, i got this question:
"when they say "edit panel" do the mean the Texture panel layered texture system available via the T button in the Surface Editor? And what are the "image correction controls" they are referring to?"
I answered yes to first question, and i suggested "image controls" are just hue-sat-gamma-contrast we get into LW image editor.
Just let me know if you need mt to ask more.

Paolo

[Mihnea Balta]

Yeah, this button:



leads to this panel with the adjustment controls:



I can't read those sliders from the Lightwave SDK (or I don't know how).

Thanks!

[PaZ]

hi,
any new on this front ?
I know Chuck is waiting some papers, or something alike... let me know


paolo

[Mihnea Balta]

I've signed some papers, but somebody else was supposed to send them to NewTek. I'll check what happened and get back to you.

[PaZ]

thanks