[stefan_kaplan]

To produce "diagrammatic" renderings with a clean, white sky and a more b/w look, I often exaggerate the Sky Dome intensity.
The rendering turns out as expected, but Fire stays "warm" in color... Maybe a small issue.

Sky Dome intensity is set at 50000 cd/m2

Here is what Fire shows:


And here is the render:


/Stefan

[JDHill]

I tried to reproduce this here, but I don't really see much difference in tone between the image in Fire and that rendered in Maxwell Render. Do you observe a similar discrepancy if you use Fire in Studio, rather than the plugin? Just out of curiosity, what happens if you use a higher SL in the plugin's Fire Settings?

[stefan_kaplan]

It seems that Fire in Maxwell and SketchUp produce the same warm result, not as extreme in this model though, but still quite visible:

FIRE in SketchUp (Quality "1" (min), SL 9):


FIRE in SketchUp (Quality "7" (max), SL around 9)
Resized in PS (no color correction):


FIRE in Studio (Quality "10" (max), SL ?)
Screen dumped and cropped in PS, since Studio kept crashing when trying to Save Image from FIRE :


Maxwell Render from SketchUp export (SL 9):


When importing the SketchUp-produced mxs into Studio, the sun-time was all wrong. Environment Setting was IBL (use for disabled: Sky Dome). Weird.
Had to change to Physical Sky (where the time-settings was written correctly), click the time a minute ahead and back again to update the sun position. Then return to Sky Dome...
And all those many buttons and panels and sliders and hidden windows and... I'm glad I never have to use Studio.

A little extra request: Could you make it possible to save the Fire-image when Fire is stopped?

/Stefan

[JDHill]

Thanks for checking -- as far as I know, Maxwell Fire in a plugin or Studio is the identical code, so I just wanted to rule out that the plugin is doing something specially wrong in setting up the scene. I can't comment much on what might happen inside the engine, but I'll try to come up with a minimal scene that reproduces the issue -- to help me in doing that, could you send me your SketchUp model?

As to how the environment looks in Studio, it's not really as weird as it might seem at first. Reason being, if you are using Sky Dome in the plugin, and you have the Color set to Application, then the environment is actually done using IBL, where the Reflection/Refraction/Illumination channels use a white HDR, and the Background channel uses the gradient Sky Dome, with the gradient being derived from SketchUp's colors. That's done so that the illumination of the scene can be neutral -- otherwise (i.e. if it used straight Maxwell Sky Dome) the whole scene would have a color cast from the gradient colors. If you want to export to Studio and see Sky Dome set in the environment, you would want to set Sky Dome Color to Custom and define explicit Sky Dome colors.

As far as the sun direction being off in Studio, the plugin sets the sun direction not by date/time, but by direction, obtained directly from SketchUp. So I suppose there is room in Studio for a bug, but it appears to work fine here in a simple test.

Regarding saving the image when Fire is disabled, I will see what I can do. For the time being, you could manually copy [documents]/Maxwell/SketchUp/temp/thumbs/fire_image.jpg.

[stefan_kaplan]

I can't seem to make the Multilight "Color + Intensity" feature work in neither the Windows nor OSX version of the plugin.
Multilight "Intensity" feature works fine, though.
/Stefan

[JDHill]

Yes, it's due to a typo in the code, where multilight is set to 'intensity' regardless of which mode is chosen. A workaround would be to add -ml:color to the command-line.