[Brendan Sharp]

in the concerned model, I have a street scape which includes lamposts as 1 root block and many repeat instances.
On first test render i encountered a strange pixelation caused by the emmiter plane in the lamp head, even when render completes (approx 5 mins, time/SL/threads = 10/19/0).
rendering diffuse + reflections. result, (physical sky):

emitter test 1 by be810fa053dd80dec18ac2d8c9207acd, on Flickr
better Result with emitter layer turned off same settings (physical sky):

emiter test 1b by be810fa053dd80dec18ac2d8c9207acd, on Flickr

From here I read the forum posts and came across a posting which stated emitters can't be in block instances:

JDHill
Post subject: Re: SSSS and block trouble with V2
PostPosted: 04 Oct 2009, 21:27
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I have not known of any limitation like that; the only ones I know of are:

1. instances cannot have emitter materials, nor be instances of an emitter
2. emitter materials cannot be used in a multi-material situation

For (1), this limitation may or may not have been lifted; it was at one point during development, but I lost track of whether it came back or not. For (2), it does not apply in Rhino, as we cannot support multi-materials at the current time.

As for the original question of instances not appearing, I am not aware of a specific problem here, but I'll see if I can reproduce what you describe. On the question of thin sss crashing, I did find earlier that certain combinations of attenuation and roughness are causing a problem: viewtopic.php?p=309175#p309175

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I tried changing the emitter surface to a mesh and updated the related blocks, I then exploded all blocks extraceted the emitters (copy all emitters), undo explode blocks, removed original emitter from the root block and updated all the other incidences, after this all emitters were pasted so they were no longer in the blocks but occured in the same lamp heads (same positions as before)- No change in results.
result (sky dome to remove doubt about turbidity + wavelength component etc. NO SCATTERING OR ANYTHING ENABLED ON ALL RENDERS BY THE WAY)

emiter test 3 by be810fa053dd80dec18ac2d8c9207acd, on Flickr

turning emmiter channel fader to full and lowering environment fader reveals the troubling pixel effect.
same settings emmitters off:

emiter test 3b by be810fa053dd80dec18ac2d8c9207acd, on Flickr
Now with blocks turned off and just emmiter layer showing:

emiter test 4c by be810fa053dd80dec18ac2d8c9207acd, on Flickr
shows the pixely results unwanted...

emiter test 4 by be810fa053dd80dec18ac2d8c9207acd, on Flickr
Why is this please am I missing something?????

[JDHill]

Could you tell me which version of the plugin you are using? The most recent ones allow emitters to be used with blocks by exporting geometry instead of an instance when an emitter material is detected either on the block definition, or on any given instance of it. You can confirm whether or not this is being done by looking at the MXS in Studio.

As for the noise, that is not really a plugin-related question, but it looks to me like the image needs more SL. Could be materials-related though too.

[Brendan Sharp]

Thanks for the replyJD.

the maxwell dropdown menu- about states version 2.5.0.0.

when writing scene to mxs and open in maxwell studio there are no instances listed in the window entitled instances and a long list of meshes appear under the layer tree in a list under street lamp single which is one level below blocks, on the same branch.

Also may i take this chance to clear up whether there are any fundemental differences between maxwell studio and the rhino plugin, in terms of performance- appart from the obvious ones; Layout format, which sections parameters occur under, and that cameras are required in studio instead of using active viewports to aim the scene.

In short would there likely be occasions where using studio is preferable than working inside the comfort zone of familiar rhino, disregarding cross software compatability issueswhich may arise when obtaining clients work etc.

thanks...

[JDHill]

Well, since Maxwell Render (the engine) simply renders MXS files, it does not matter whether you create them with a plugin, or with Studio. Studio can be helpful for situations like this, where you are trying to debug a scene; where you have no way, just looking at a rendered image, to know what you are really looking at, in Studio, you can inspect how materials, settings, etc., are being written by the plugin. So it can be pretty valuable for that, but just for doing your normal work, there should usually be very little need to use it.

On the plugin version, I might recommend seeing the post in this forum about the 2.5.1 release preview plugin; depending on how your scenes are built, it may significantly speed up your exports.

[Brendan Sharp]

ok great thanks so much for clearing that up couldn't see any easy case answers in the manual.
What you just stated would be a great pre- tense inserted before the intro sections to both studio manual and plugin manuals- would save a lot of info overload for newbs. . .

I'll check out updating the software and let you know progress. it's a large file and crashed a couple of times in studio when selecting after import.

[tom]

I don't have a problem here with this quick test:


Maybe, you can send me the MXS to see what's going on.

[Brendan Sharp]

Subject: emiiters in blocks, POSSIBLE? - strange particles

Maybe, you can send me the MXS to see what's going on.

ok no problem, the file is 66 MB and too big for my email account.

Can i send you the file via yousendit.com its very easy simply i upload it, you click the link recieved in an e mail i will send you and then download it. all it takes is an e mail user name and password to register in seconds.

I will need your email address first please.