Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Hi,

Will it be possible in a future version of the plugin to either have procedurals in the embedded material editor within Sketchup, or, as I have now, to show up in a referenced MXI file? At the moment my material is just a plain colour, although renders correctly. At present however, there seems no way to adjust the texture mapping, or scale within Sketchup, only in the Maxwell material editor. I presume this is because procedurals are generated at render time as the sea and grass extensions?

Also, it appears that the copy texture to SketchUp material function only uses the texture in the bump map slot. For some materials this is fine as I have used the diffuse map with saturation reduced to 0. However, many of my textures have dedicated bump maps and therefore it would be nice if the diffuse texture was used instead. Is there any way around this without having to change my existing MXI materials?

Thanks.

It is not likely that procedurals will be exposed outside MXED/Studio in the near future, but it is indeed possible to map them in SketchUp. In the MXED texture editor, there is a Save button in the procedurals section; you can save your procedural to disk, then put it in some slot in material, say BSDF > weight, then disable that slot (i.e. un-check the box next to the black/yellow checker texture button). Even when disabled, it's still possible to make this the "active" texture in the MXM, by going to the drop-down above & left of the material preview (also a black/yellow checker button), and selecting this disabled weight texture. Now, when you import this MXM into SketchUp, you'll see this weight texture as being available to "Copy texture to SketchUp material".

You can of course skip all these steps (I mention them also because it appears you may not yet be aware that the texture shown for the "Copy texture to SketchUp material" button is the one set as "active" in the MXM, in MXED), and just directly edit the associated SketchUp material, putting this or any other texture into it, as you'd do if you weren't using any plugin. Something important to keep in mind with procedurals, though, is that if you try to distort the texture on a face, it won't work with the procedural, since in that case, we have to ask SketchUp to write us a distorted texture just for that face (and consequently, generate a unique material in the MXS, just for this texture); the face UVs are not actually distorted, so they won't render as such with a procedural texture.

Thanks very much for the quick reply JD, most helpful. You are correct, I had not spotted the top left "active" material selection pull down. All is well once more!