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Newbie for the 2nd time

Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2012 6:00 pm
by kmwhitt
I have recently upgraded to the latest version of Maxwell Render after not using it for more than 6 years. Boy, has a lot changed! I am having trouble finding training resources - particulary, some type of test object for material creation. I am also very interested in finding test scenes for C4D that I can dissect. I was hoping the resource section of this forum would point me in the right direction, but most of the posts are from years ago and the links, unfortunately, broken. I have been to resources.maxwellrender.com, but don't see any actual geometry - only materials and images. Would someone please advise me as to where I should start re-learning this excellent program? Thanks, Kevin

Re: Newbie for the 2nd time

Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2012 6:03 pm
by kmwhitt
A trefoil knot in a studio set-up would be great. I would also like to find the texture for the floor (numeric grid) that I see in the Vimeo training vids.

Re: Newbie for the 2nd time

Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2012 7:47 pm
by Neil Evans
Hey,
Digital tutors have some good training vids.. Maybe check those out.

Re: Newbie for the 2nd time

Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2012 11:38 pm
by JDHill
Regarding a test object for material creation, that functionality is already built into the material editor. You can select from any of the MXS preview scenes, contained in the /preview folder of your Maxwell Render installation. You can also create your own preview scenes and put them in that folder, if you want to. Such a scene is an MXS file like any other, with one special requirement: that it contain a material named "preview" -- this material is replaced with the one you're currently editing, when the material editor loads your preview scene.

On other resources, I don't have much in the way of example Cinema scenes. Most of what I have are spheres, cubes, strange object hierarchies, etc -- things that are only useful for testing code. To get familiar with the plugin, I would just recommend reading its PDF manual (you'll find a Help command for opening that, in the plugin menu) and getting familiar with the various objects and tags that the plugin provides.

Lastly, not sure if you've seen them already, but there were recently some nice Maxwell for Cinema 4D tutorials posted on vimeo. Those give a very nice introduction to the plugin, and Maxwell Render 2.x.

Re: Newbie for the 2nd time

Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2012 2:30 pm
by kmwhitt
Thanks for the replies. My apologies for responding so late - it's been a busy week.

Yes, I joined VTC so that I could take the Maxwell Render 2 Course. It looks like decent training.

JDHill - I do like Maxwell's render preview, but it is still difficult to judge scale and bump. I finally figured out how to render a region in a scene I am working on, so that should suffice.

I went through the Vimeo series over the weekend and it did help a great deal!

Thanks again for the posts...

Kevin