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Maxwell for Rhino
Version 2.5.11 Release Notes

Version 2.5.11 brings Maxwell Fire to the plugin's material editor.

Changes

• Added new Fire-based material preview rendering.
• Wizards now offer to overwrite the current material.
• Added new Maxwell 2.5-style SSS Preset wizards.

Fixes

• Removed some spurious calls to refresh Fire.
• MXI/IES emitters were enabled even with bad paths.
• Material assignment on nested blocks was broken.
• Material assignment to curves was not persisted.
• Meshes could be written with not enough projectors.
• Bit depths other than 8bpp caused problems in Fire.
• Z-clip values were not being validated.
• Maxwell_ExtractMaterials was partially broken.
• 'blocks' node was created, even with no blocks.
• Bad IES paths were not being fixed sometimes.
• Invalid path report was ignoring IES files.
• Pack and Go could fail to copy IES files.
• Textures could not be disabled in Fire.
• Fire was not updated for some texture changes.
• Objects with no tex coords were not being fixed.

Download links:

• (version superseded)

Errr. Jeremy, my understanding of "real-time preview" is that whatever change I make to the material will trigger a re-render of the material preview.
Here, nothing happens when I toggle the red button on...

Cheers,

--
Olivier

Interesting!

btw, in the new colour scheme, the tab text is really hard to see. This is how it looks on my system:

osuire wrote:Errr. Jeremy, my understanding of "real-time preview" is that whatever change I make to the material will trigger a re-render of the material preview.
Here, nothing happens when I toggle the red button on...

Cheers,

--
Olivier

Same thing for me.

EDIT: After launching the Fire window, the material preview also seem to update whenever I change one of the material attributes,.

Btw, another thing:

In the options tab, under the "Materials defaults" section, there are no drop downs menus for "Preview scene" and "Preview engine",. but I don't remember how it was in the previous version.

bjorn.syse wrote: Same thing for me.
EDIT: After launching the Fire window, the material preview also seem to update whenever I change one of the material attributes,.

Yep, I see that too.
I would add that the fire window must be open AND enabled.

Cheers,

--
Olivier

Actually, now it has changed for me, And I'm not sure what I've done

Whenever Realtime preview in the material editor is enabled, OR if I manually update the preview, I no longer get that smooth render with the status bar growing as the SL increases, but instad Rhino freezes for the time it need to update the preview - and then the preview is updated in one go. I got it to crash also.

I have been tampering with the Thread settings in both the Options tab and the right-click of the Fire window. What settings do you recommend?

- björn

osuire wrote:Errr. Jeremy, my understanding of "real-time preview" is that whatever change I make to the material will trigger a re-render of the material preview.
Here, nothing happens when I toggle the red button on...

Yes, but after it is toggled-on, what happens to the material preview if you alter any parameter in the material?

osuire wrote:btw, in the new colour scheme, the tab text is really hard to see.

Thanks, I hadn't noticed. Of course, you can always go back to the old color scheme by loading the classic.xml UI colors file.

Same thing for me.

bjorn.syse wrote:EDIT: After launching the Fire window, the material preview also seem to update whenever I change one of the material attributes,.

Are you sure? The one thing (the material preview) should have nothing to do with the other (the Fire window).

osuire wrote:In the options tab, under the "Materials defaults" section, there are no drop downs menus for "Preview scene" and "Preview engine",. but I don't remember how it was in the previous version.

There have never been dropdowns for them; you just type in whatever value you want. The 'Preview Engine' one doesn't do anything, and should not appear; I'll remove it.

osuire wrote:

bjorn.syse wrote:Same thing for me.
EDIT: After launching the Fire window, the material preview also seem to update whenever I change one of the material attributes,.

Yep, I see that too.
I would add that the fire window must be open AND enabled.

As I say, these two things are not connected to one another at all, so I am trying to figure how they seem to be related for you.

Actually, now it has changed for me, And I'm not sure what I've done

Whenever Realtime preview in the material editor is enabled, OR if I manually update the preview, I no longer get that smooth render with the status bar growing as the SL increases, but instad Rhino freezes for the time it need to update the preview - and then the preview is updated in one go. I got it to crash also.

I have been tampering with the Thread settings in both the Options tab and the right-click of the Fire window. What settings do you recommend?

That is why you can enable/disable realtime preview in the material editor; because if you have less cores than the number being used by material preview and fire, then it could really drag your machine down, since you are basically asking two instances of Maxwell to render at the same time, whenever you change a material parameter. I would recommend having the material preview set to a low number like 1, and the Fire window set to [number of cores - 1 or 2]. I got your crash report from McNeel, and it's unrelated -- there is some texture in your scene which Windows is having some trouble reading.

Hi JD : Note that you quote me for all the questions, but some of them are not from me

Regarding the material preview, it seems to work OK now in a new instance of Rhino, and without having to fire Fire.
But it gives the impression that I needed to do it at least once to get the preview working.
Of course, it could be accidental, but one thing's for sure, the preview somehow needs a little kick in the butt to get started.

--
Olivier

Except for the last one, which I forgot, I thought I attributed your quotes to you, and Björn's to him.

On your actual comment, I guess I don't understand -- is there some case in which:

a) real time material preview is enabled, but is not responding to material changes?
b) real time material preview is disabled, but is responding to material changes?

Because I would like to know -- it shouldn't be possible.

Hi Jeremy,

Well, what happened is that I read your notes about the new plug-in being able to display real-time material preview and got all excited, and tried to make it work but couldn't.
Even with the red button ON in the material editor, no update would happen.

Then, to Bjorn's advice I fired up a Fire window, went back to the material edito, and suddenly, the real-time material preview was working as expected.

Cheers,

--
Olivier

Thanks -- doesn't make any sense, but I'll try to theorize from there.

JDHill wrote:a) real time material preview is enabled, but is not responding to material changes?
b) real time material preview is disabled, but is responding to material changes?

Yes,

a) When starting a Rhino instance where the Fire window is not opened. I can create a new Material,and it's thumbnail is rendered right away. However, if I change the reflectance color, the thumbnail is not updated. even though the Red ball is active.



b) Only in the case, when I first create a new material. Then, the thumbnail is updated/created for the first time, even though Realtime preview is disabled.

All this changes when I open the Fire window. Even without enabling Fire, the Realtime preview now works in the Material editor. This also goes for when restarting Rhino, and the Fire window is showing from the start.

Can you not reproduce this on your end?

Actually, As I write this, I sometimes can no longer see the Material Layers in the material editor. A Rhino Restart helped for this. Hmm,. What's going on here...



I'm on Windows XP 64 with an Nvidia Quadro FX 1800, latest drivers as of today.

btw, thanks for the quick reply. And about the dropdown menu for the preview scenes, I just figured one should be there since there is one when you choose preview scene from within the material editor.

regards

- björn

Is this running on Parallels or Bootcamp?

JDHill wrote:Is this running on Parallels or Bootcamp?

Not here anyways : Win 7 -64bits on a natural-born PC .


--
Olivier