Maxwell Render | Official public forum

hi,

is there any way to use paths that involve characters specific to the germen language, like "ä, ö, ü..." within the plug-in?

the problem does not effect studio nor the standalone material editor.

additionally: it only seems to be a problem with those charachters if used in texture-paths.
if for example used in the path for the output folder, there seems to be no problem.

Thanks, it looks like there is some new problem here -- let me see what I can do.

JDHill wrote:Thanks, it looks like there is some new problem here -- let me see what I can do.

strange... i don't seem to be able to recreate this behaviour anymore: textures are being accepted with german characters in their paths now.

i don't see any clue why the steps i took, since the last time i was able to recreated it, should in any way influence this behaviour... but... for the sake of trying to be transparent... here you go:

- closed c4d
- went to plug-in directory and opened every .res and .h and such i could find, that "could be possibly be involved in this topic" (in my eyes, that is, and looked for... well i don't know. ( DON'T LAUGH !!!!)
- became nervous, since i was browsing the "live"-directory, so i shut down the notepad2.exe (without having changed and/or saved anything), made a copy of the plug and put the copy somewhere else
- also made a copy of the 2.7.23 version of the plug
- went through the same "looking for i don't know what..."-method , now comparing 2.7.23-files with v3 files, but this time using the copies of the plugs
- found nothing, i would have been able to understand ( go figure! ), so shut down the notedpads (without editing and/or saving anything)
- put the v3 plug back into the c4d-plug-directory
- while at it: let me go in to the nextlimit preview dir of v2 and copy all of the preview-scenes in there (i had some additional stuff in there) and paste those into the preview dir of v3, so i could try out those old additional preview scenes with v3 too
- restart cinema
- go to maxwell-prefs within c4d and change the preview threads from "0" to "11" (pc has 12 (6 physical) cores) and the preview scene to "stage2"
- restart c4d
- play a little with the new sss-wizards within the c4d-maxwell-editor... play along... click on the texture-button to use an rgb as a map.
- just for fun: let me try this path with the special characters again.
- works
- wonder
- close play-sss-material and create a new standard (non-wizard-) maxwell-material.
- click on texure button, choose "special-characters" path.
- works
- not able to reproduce anymore

i really can't see any connection here, but still... that's all i did...

additional info... for what it's worth: i saw this, first existing then disappearing, problem on the network storage (it's a seagate 2tb-NAS) i am using. haven't seen or tried it on local hd.

My repro here involves selecting such a texture path in the plugin texture editor, saving the file, and then re-opening or reverting it, at which time characters in the path are replaced with \uNNNN unicode codes. It doesn't make much sense yet though, since from the plugin's point of view, this should be no different than creating a copy of the material, but that does not produce a similar issue. So we'll see.

JDHill wrote:My repro here involves selecting such a texture path in the plugin texture editor, saving the file, and then re-opening or reverting it, at which time characters in the path are replaced with \uNNNN unicode codes. ...

yes, this way i can reproduce that here, too. btw: i'm doing this at home on the laptop, so it's on the local hd, no network drive, this time.

Please check this again with 3.0.5; though changes are necessary to Maxwell itself to ensure robust unicode support, it should at least be working better now within the plugin itself.

JDHill wrote:Please check this again with 3.0.5; though changes are necessary to Maxwell itself to ensure robust unicode support, it should at least be working better now within the plugin itself.

yes, this specific topic seems to be fixed.
but following your recreation method, the material-thingy seems to be gone south totally, now.

- fresh, empty scene.
- add the scene object (this whole bug procedure doesn't happen, if no scene-object is in the scene.)
- add a cube
- create a 1-bsdf maxwell material
- add a texture to a channel in the bsdf
- fire, render, everythings's fine.
- save scene
- close scene
- open scene, that you saved a moment ago
- look at the material (while the preview render/thumb stayed the same, the one-layer material changed to one with a layer that consists of an emitter and a bsdf additional to a displacement layer. the texture is completely gone, too.

this is a deal-breaker, for sure.

I see what you mean, but only when the texture path has non-English characters, correct? Clearly it's being read incorrectly in that case; this screws up the version number of the material, which is what would cause the disp/emitter to not be hidden.

JDHill wrote:I see what you mean, but only when the texture path has non-English characters, correct? ...

no. incorrect. this had nothing to do with the non-english topic. that part seems to be working well now.

I'll look into it. Here, there have to be non-english characters involved to make it fail. It may be important to know which version of Cinema you're using; I assume R15, but please let me know.

yes, it's the latest r15 (using the german language package btw).

Thanks, it turned out to be unrelated to the type of characters, and rather to the total length of text used to store the material. By chance, in the quick test I did above, I happened to be choosing a path without non-english characters, then one with them, which gave it the false appearance of being a required condition. Now I need to check that fixing the underlying issue won't break something else, and then I can upload another update.

Okay, this turned out to be a major pain, but it should be handled now. We still cannot handle full unicode, but at least extended ASCII should now be well-supported, so please let me know if you find any new ways to break it.

so far it seems my destructive powers have come to a halt (with the 3.0.6).
for both issues, that is: the non-english characters issue, as well as the other one, that was adding additional layers and so forth.

thx a lot for fixing it.