[JDHill]

Hi Francois -- that's a good idea, and it's possible to do, so I wrote it today. It works based on selected groups & components; if you right-click when any of these are selected, you will see an item in the plugin's entry in the right-click menu which lets you export the selected objects to mxs, studio.exe, or maxwell.exe. When you export this way, I add a '_selection' modifier to the scene output name to differentiate partial exports from full exports of the same scene. I've tested it, and it looks like everything merges very well in Studio, even with complex scenes.

Brodie -- there are two basic things you're talking about there: (a) material picking/assignment, and (b) how MXMs are used. For (a), what I'm talking about above is a tool used for selecting materials which are already assigned to entities, and for assigning the current material to an entity selection, without needing to use the SU paint bucket and have it popping up the SU materials panel. For (b), the plugin works by adding custom attribute data to SU materials, which is shown/edited using its material editor UI. One of the attributes is whether the material uses its 'MXM' mode or not -- if it does, then it references an MXM file, and if that file has an active texture, then yes, that texture will be seen on the entities to which the material is assigned. If it has no active texture then you will see the basic color of the MXM on those entities. The preview image for the MXM is also shown in the plugin's material UI.

[numerobis]

One of the attributes is whether the material uses its 'MXM' mode or not -- if it does, then it references an MXM file, and if that file has an active texture, then yes, that texture will be seen on the entities to which the material is assigned. If it has no active texture then you will see the basic color of the MXM on those entities. The preview image for the MXM is also shown in the plugin's material UI.

This sounds great!
Where can i set a texture as 'active' in the mxm? Would it be possible to set a max resolution for the imported texture?

[Half Life]

Hi Francois -- that's a good idea, and it's possible to do, so I wrote it today. It works based on selected groups & components; if you right-click when any of these are selected, you will see an item in the plugin's entry in the right-click menu which lets you export the selected objects to mxs, studio.exe, or maxwell.exe. When you export this way, I add a '_selection' modifier to the scene output name to differentiate partial exports from full exports of the same scene. I've tested it, and it looks like everything merges very well in Studio, even with complex scenes.

WOW! that is a game changer right there -- my whole workflow just got upgraded

Best,
Jason.

[JDHill]

Where can i set a texture as 'active' in the mxm? Would it be possible to set a max resolution for the imported texture?

You set the active texture in MXED -- there is a drop-down button just below the preview image, which holds a list of the textures in the material. On the second thing, no, not at first -- this falls under the category of optimizations, and I'll leave those until after we see how the basic system is working.

[numerobis]

ahh ok - i've found it! thanks!
will it be possible to deactivate the automated texture loading and load a smaller texture separately?

wow, so many useful improvements! this plug will be the beginning of a new era!

[fv]

I am really happy I posted my request. That would be a big timesaver. Also very easy to work on the mxs models.

Sometimes though there are some problems importing components as instances getting mixed up in excisting groups. Making it hard to delete the newly imported instances hiding away or particially hiding within other already imported groups. I should test this problem further to see if this is my fault or a SU to MXS problem.

Tx again for responding so enthousiasticly to my request and getting it to work !

Francois

[JDHill]

will it be possible to deactivate the automated texture loading and load a smaller texture separately?

Well, there will be a couple of ways to approach it, but to start with, it will just be automatic: whichever texture is active in the MXM will simply be shown. Some of the options we have for dealing with this differently later on might include:

1. putting a 'copy MXM texture to SU material' button in the UI, where by default, the texture is not shown, and you decide whether it should be shown explicitly
2. we could establish a specific strategy, where the plugin always looks for a texture with a certain suffix, for example, looking for a texture named tex_small.jpg when the file specified is tex.jpg

I'll leave this for after you've used the plugin though -- we can have some discussions about it then and decide which changes make the most sense. A common characteristic of plugins is that they tend toward so-called 'feature creep', where strange things (useful, but strange) are implemented to work around deficiencies in the OS or the host app. These types of things might help with productivity in specific scenarios, but they make a plugin confusing to use. So here, I want to approach it carefully and make sure that whatever is added is something that feels natural. The best solutions do what needs to be done, without getting in the way.

[numerobis]

I'll leave this for after you've used the plugin though -- we can have some discussions about it then and decide which changes make the most sense. A common characteristic of plugins is that they tend toward so-called 'feature creep', where strange things (useful, but strange) are implemented to work around deficiencies in the OS or the host app. These types of things might help with productivity in specific scenarios, but they make a plugin confusing to use. So here, I want to approach it carefully and make sure that whatever is added is something that feels natural. The best solutions do what needs to be done, without getting in the way.

sounds good!

will the automxm option still be working?

[JDHill]

Right now, I have not re-implemented auto-mxm, mainly because I never decided whether I liked it or not. It is one of those confusing 'magical' features that might be useful, but is difficult to understand. What are your thoughts about it? Do you like it? If so, what would you change?

[numerobis]

i'm always using automxm in sketchup. i'm working with sketchup and 3dsmax and have one fixed folder where i save my mxm and textures for both apps and a low res version of the main texture for SU.
so... yes, until there will be an option to load a smaller texture into SU it would be helpful to have the automxm option, because the scene/file size is the biggest problem working with huge sketchup models - the exporter is always crashing at 1,6-1,7GB ram usage. But i think this limitation will no longer be such a big problem with your new memory management

[JDHill]

I'll take that into account -- it's not a hard feature to implement. Do you see a reason to be able to turn it on and off? I don't really need you to specify a particular directory for it -- I can just make it work automatically, using the user-configurable search directories that the new plugin will provide.

[numerobis]

cool!
so it will be active automatically if i don't use the new internal material link system? sounds good!
thanks!

[JDHill]

Well, sure, if that's what you want.

So, let's say that:

1. you have some directories set in the plugin's search paths
2. you name a SU material something like 'carpaint_cherry.mxm'

In that case, if I can find an MXM with this name in one of the directories, I can easily use it for the material at export time. If you remove that search path, or if you change the SU material name, then of course the search would fail and it would get an auto-generated Maxwell material.

Sound all right? Should I force you to include the '.mxm' in the SU material name, or should I try to search without it? The other question is, do you need a switch to disable it? I'd prefer that there wasn't, so as not to clutter up the UI with strange options, but maybe you need it?

[numerobis]

yes, if it's working like you described i think this would be a good solution and there would be no need to turn it off.
for me it would be better to keep the naming short, without the ".mxm"-extension (like it is now) if this is no problem.

[Richard]

Now I just cut the group, delete the rest and paste and export and undo the deleting of the rest after export. I can not paste the wanted geomtetry in another file since at export it will loose its origin coordinates at export to Studio.
Francois

Mate SU now has a paste in place feature! If I'm adding for studio as you are I actually save a blank copy of the same SU file so all scenes, layers, position etc are the same then just use the paste in place feature to drag in the geo before export to mxs!

@JD right click export selection hopefully includes not just groups or components but selected geo?