[dmatarch]

Hi,

I've just bought Maxwell and getting up to speed with it through Cinema. I'd like to do some animations of sun tracking across and filtering through a building. My first question is are the Maxwell parameters able to animate and interpolate between keyframes? I added an animation track to the Maxwell sun day timing in the hope of just adding two keyframes and doing it this way. The sun position remains at the keyframe 1 position until it gets to the second keyframe and just jumps to this time rather then moving gradually between them. Is there a way of getting things to work this way? I know in the future I'd like to adjust more of the Maxwell parameters to animate DoF effects etc so really hoping this is possible.

I did see a previous post to animate the sun by adding a point light and sun expression as another way of animating the sun if the above is not possible. On testing this though I have run into a problem. Maxwell doesn't seem to like the sun expression. When it is added to the point light the render produces an error and says no light is in the scene. What am I not doing right? I know the sun expression method animates smoothly between key frames from using that a lot of times in the Cinema render engine. How would using a spot light differ from the Maxwell sun?

Thank you for any help you can give,

David

[JDHill]

When you put the Sun Expression on your point light, you are not actually lighting the scene with that light -- it is just being used to determine the direction from which the sun shines (during export, the plugin searches to find the tag). If this tag is found, the light to which it is attached will not be exported -- this is probably why you are getting a 'no lights in the scene' error; just re-enable the environment in your Scene Object, and the plugin will use the Sun Expression-controlled position of the light to define the Maxwell environment.

[dmatarch]

Thank you for your quick response. That's helped set things up with the animating sun.

David