[big K]

are instances working in V2?
i have tried to setup a scene with instances but so far i was not able to get them to render or to studio.
is there anything special to know about instances i may have forgotten ?

[JDHill]

They should be working fine - could you write the steps you are using, or send me a small scene (.c4d) that shows a problem? ( jeremy at nextlimit dot com )

[big K]

i worked it out.
i normally put all my reference objects into a null object and switch the visibilty of this parent off (viewport and rendering)
but it seems that maxwell doesn´t use this object at all.
couldn´t this be changed ?
because i normally like all my reference objects at (0,0,0) for better editing. but they shouldn´t be visible at that place.

it also seems that maxwell still crashes a lot when i use the clone object in cinema and get many objects (instances). does it still crash when they intersect.
i used it for grass patches for example. only when i set a very low number and the clones spread wide, i did not get a crash.

[JDHill]

Thanks, I understand now. In the sdk, an instance has to be an instance of something - a mesh - if the source is hidden, then there is nothing to instance. So, it is behaving as designed in your scenario. On the issue of instances crashing, I am not sure what you might be seeing there, but I will check it out with the core developers.

[big K]

o.k., i see.
it works the same in cinema only that you are able to change the visibilty of the parent without harm. if you change the visibilty of the referenced mesh all instances are invisible as well. in this way i am able to make the references invisible.

i thought, it would be possible to do this in maxwell as well, but no problem if this isn´t working.

thanks for your help !

[Mr. Gog]

JD, working with instances, from cinema:

1. Low numer (about 20 or 30) Nothing happens, everything is fine.
2. Medium number (about 50 or 75) crash on voxelization, or hangs when starting renderings. They open in studio and can render through.
3. High number more than before. Same problems but when I open them in studio, some instances aren't there. So I think is a problem generated by the plug in.

Any Ideas or suggestions?

[JDHill]

1. yes, seems to work fine here.
2. not seeing this yet - I just rendered 4000+ intersecting instances without an issue.
3. if you right-click the instances panel, what is the display proxy % set to?

So, I think, we need more detail about what it is that you are instancing - just for this simple test, what I did was to make a 1000-copy array of instances of the 'low poly girl' model from the BodyPaint preset catalog.

[Mr. Gog]

We're using box. Object doesn't work!

Where I can send you the archive?

[JDHill]

In point (3), I was referring to the instances panel in Studio - you can set the % of instances to display, and many times people think instances are not being exported because the display % is set to 50%. You can set the default value in Studio's preferences.

We're using box. Object doesn't work!

As far as Instance > Display > Type > Object in the plugin's Instance object, if you select this, you must also then give the instance an object to draw in the Object link. It works here, anyway - you can send me any files at jeremy at nextlimit dot com and I'll try to see what's the problem.

[JDHill]

Mr. Gog - could you please send me the C4D file that is causing maxwell.exe to crash ( jeremy at next limit dot com )? The core developers would like to see this file to find out why it crashes.