[eric nixon]

Hi JD, this is the second time this has happened so I thought I'd mention it.

When I disable scene disp then re-enable it, sometimes maxwell crashes after that OR it works but for mxm's in the scene which have a disabled disp component, that disp becomes activated even though in mxed its still turned off. In your material editor the mxm shows the disp turned on, and if i again disable it there, it stays off.

sry about garbled sentence, I just woke up.

[JDHill]

Thanks, but I'll need you to help me understand better, what is involved.

My first question has to do with Maxwell crashing when you disable scene displacement, and then re-enable it: we are talking about Scene Object > Engine > Globals > Displacement, correct? What is meant when you say that Maxwell crashes, though -- Maxwell Render, or Maxwell FIRE in the plugin? If the latter, there would be a re-export of the scene involved after changing the switch, and I'm not able to observe any problem here, with doing that.

Second point of confusion regards how you are talking about MXM files and the plugin material editor at the same time: if you link to an MXM, then you could not see the displacement in the plugin material editor, since for MXM-linked materials, the material editor UI just shows the same thing as the AM, and not the whole material structure. On the other hand, if you are not linking to an MXM, then how does an MXM file or MXED enter into the question?

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Now just some general notes on how this works. The Globals > Displacement switch is only that: it is literally a single 0 or 1 written into the data, telling the engine whether you want to disable all displacement. Point being, it does not affect the actual composition of any materials, so the question of whether an individual material displacement component was enabled or disabled doesn't enter into it. When it is disabled, the engine just skips over any displacement as it is preprocessing the scene for rendering.

All that said, over the course of writing this, and performing some tests, I think I may have figured out what you're talking about. Here is the sequence of steps I am able to use to reproduce what may be the issue (I use Studio to create a simple scene from scratch, to minimize the number of variables involved):

1. Open Studio, import a plane, and create a material.
2. Add a pretess displacement, assign the material to the plane.
3. Click Render to send the scene in Maxwell Render.
4. Stop the render, and disable Globals > Displacement.
5. Restart the render: unexpectedly, displacement is still rendered.
6. Stop the render and reload the scene using File > Recent MXS.
7. Disable Globals > Displacement, and start the render.
8. As expected, displacement is disabled.
9. Stop the render, and enable Globals > Displacement.
10. Restart the render: unexpectedly, displacement is still rendered.

So it appears the switch is not working when restarting, but works fine if set before rendering, with the workaround being to make sure and reload the MXS before restarting the render. Please let me know if this is indeed the behavior you were describing.

[eric nixon]

Heres what happens;

I'm in c4d, mxm is not linked, mxm has disp but its disabled. Then I disabled disp for the whole scene, do some renders.. then I re-enable scene disp. Now, if I open the mxm/s in mxed disp is still turned off like before, but if I open them in the plugin material editor disp is now turned on??

Re. the crash, I think it just started to voxelise and then, poof disappeared, sorry I'm not sure, there have been a few crashes (so I'm hazy about what happened with this one) the other crashes were due to me trying really weird things, dont worry about them.

After this happened I replaced the (apparently corrupted) scene object and everything was good again.