[oz42]

I installed 2.5 and ran a couple of quick, simple tests (simple geometry on a plane and then rendered and recent scene) to make sure that the plugin still worked with Softimage and it did.

Unfortunately I'm now in the middle of a project and am trying to create new materials and none of them work!! Any material created from new or an old material opened up in mxed and altered, immediately renders red and Softimage comes up with an error saying that the new (or altered mxm) in invalid.

Please help!

[Mihnea Balta]

The 2.1 plug-in can't read MXM files created by MXED 2.5 because the format has changed. We have a new build ready, hopefully it will be available for download in a day or two.

[oz42]

fantastic news, thanks for the update. I'll try delaying tactics with the client and excitedly await the new plugin. Thanks.

[oz42]

Mihnea,

thanks for releasing the new plugin for Softimage, am downloading now and this will really help with the project I'm currently doing!

I notice that FIRE isn't supported. Although it's not critical for me right now, I was wondering whether the Softimage SDK will allow for this in the near future?

Cheers,

[oz42]

thanks for the new plugin, the 2.5 materials work fine now (although I notice that their thumbnails no longer show up in Windows Explorer! (not a major issue!))

The new plugin also resolves the shadow channel issue I was having here http://maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopi ... 97&t=35535 so thanks again!

P.S. any news on FIRE in Softimage?

[Mihnea Balta]

From a workflow point of view, integrating FIRE makes sense when there's a built-in material editor. In Softimage we use referenced materials because the UI toolkit is too limited to support the complex structure of the Maxwell material. In this case, since materials are edited with MXED, we can't update the FIRE window while you're tweaking a material. You would have to click edit, make a change and close MXED to see the change in FIRE, and that's hardly interactive.

We could probably build a material editor and embed it in Softimage using the platform UI API (Windows API, basically, since we don't support the plug-in on Linux anyway), but it would be quite a bit of work. However, we've taken a look at the event system in Softimage, and it's not good enough to support an interactive renderer. It's not even possible to be notified in a reliable way when an object gets deleted.

Given all this, we've decided we won't support FIRE in Softimage.

Edit: for the thumbnail issue, see if this thread helps.

[oz42]

Mihnea,

thanks for the tip on the thumbnails, I'll give that a go...

It's a shame FIRE can't be implemented at the moment, it would be great to have the render region in Softimage using Maxwell!

I know there are not as many 3rd party renderers in Softimage as there are, for example, in MAX is what you describe above enough of an issue to raise the problem with Autodesk to try to get them to make the process more open?

With regard to the interactive part of the problem, Arnold seem to have found some sort of solution http://vimeo.com/15878348 (from about 30:00 onwards). Is it worth speaking to them to try to get a method for Maxwell?

[Mihnea Balta]

Arnold's materials are shading networks composed of nodes with relatively simple attributes and UI, so that's easy to integrate in Softimage. Since they are made of XSI nodes, it's possible to track changes to them and update the preview render. I'm still curious how they handle geometry modifications and object removal, since those are not shown in the video (my guess is that they don't). We had a prototype FIRE implementation in XSI, but we dropped it after we saw how many things are broken, badly designed or don't exist at all in the relevant APIs. The only thing which worked more or less was moving the camera around, but even that's difficult to do if you group the camera with something and move the group.

Maxwell has a single, monolithic material with lots of functionality, so it requires a more complex UI. We could split it into nodes (actually, that's how it's implemented in Maya and Max behind the scenes, but with a custom UI on top to hide it), but editing a material would be considerably more difficult than it is in MXED. For example, in order to add a layer, you would have to create a layer node, create a BSDF node, and connect them to the correct slots. Moving a layer from the bottom of the stack to the top is a simple drag'n'drop operation in MXED, but would mean disconnecting all the layers and reconnecting them in the correct order in a network-based implementation. I think we would end up with something too clumsy to be useful. Skipping the Softimage SDK entirely and building our own editor window is most likely possible, but as I said, it takes some work, and I don't know when/if we will have time to do it.

[oz42]

Many thanks for the detailed explanation, it's great to know that you've tried many options but it's a shame it seems to have been made so complicated (by Autodesk?) to integrate Maxwell fully into Softimage.

The current workflow works pretty well for me at the moment but any additional functionality that you can add over time (e.g. FIRE in a Render Region or mxm's in the Render Tree (if these tasks ever become simpler in future versions of the SDK?)) would be great