[salati]

Whenever I move the lights I don't see the Fire preview updating forcing me to "re-export" the scene every time I make such a change.

This is driving me nuts. Is anyone else noticing this?

I am using r18.0.20 and maxwell 3.2.5 plugin.

[JDHill]

That is currently the expected behavior in this plugin; changes to material and scene parameters are updated in real time, but changes to geometry are not.

[salati]

Wow I am surprised. This really slows down the process of placing lights.

Any reason why such a important feature is not supported especially when its supported by Maxwell for rhino?

[JDHill]

The reason is, where Rhino's internal design aligns with Maxwell in such a way as to support this type of capability (though you'll notice, there are quite a few caveats, such as rotating geometry, etc), Cinema's does not. In Maxwell, every object has a unique and permanent identity, and this is the same in Rhino (it is even stronger); in Cinema, there exists no such concept. Hacks are possible, but I have not yet come up with something satisfactory (I write both of these plugins, btw).

[salati]

Interesting. I wonder how Arnold or Octane renders do it where this feature works flawlessly?

[JDHill]

I really couldn't speculate on that. But, we have been working on a new internal system (I've alluded to this before, but it takes some time to replace something that's been built upon for over a dozen years) for Maxwell, which will fundamentally change many things. It's not readily apparent from the outside, but when the basis of Maxwell was created, there was no such concept as Maxwell FIRE at all; that was bolted on later, turning plugins that were essentially glorified OBJ-exporters into things that were supposed to deal with working on scenes in real time. It wasn't always the case that you could move lights and things around in Rhino; that came some time after FIRE appeared -- at first, it was the same there as it is here, with re-export necessary whenever geometry changed.

[salati]

Cool. I really hope you guys bring this feature. Its one of those things that when you try it in another renderer it spoils you and can you can't imagine going back to a world without that

What would really be super cool is if you could just click on the model and the lights are automatically orientated in that direction (similar to light paint feature in HDR Light studio or Slick2 for modo) and then you just tweak it further.

BTW is the upcoming v4 going to bring out some of the internal restructure you were talking about or is it still a long term project?

[JDHill]

No, that project is still under development. I don't know what's been said about it, so I don't want to be more specific.