Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Hi I don't know if Im running up against the limitations of SU plugin,I cannot export a relatively simple scene, yes It has a high face count 700k. (the high face count being 3 frog bushes in the foreground )

cant do a fire render either

but I though given enough time I should be able to export as an MXS into studio. - let overnight but no joy and no memory left.

Is this likely to be a wall and I have to take another approach - I haven't really used Studio yet apart from to set up renders



Retina MacBook Pro
2.8Ghz i7
16Gb Ram

There is no inherent limitation, so I'd first make sure the plugin is properly licensed, and that you are using the current version 3.2.5 plugin (both pieces of information are available at Extensions > Maxwell > About).

That said, I might try hiding some of the vegetation to see if there might be a particular component that's causing a problem. The way some foliage is created, it can be helpful to right-click the component and enable Maxwell > UV Coordinates > Ignore Distortion; otherwise, depending on how the geometry was textured, it may be necessary for the plugin to ask SketchUp to write an individual texture file for each leaf. Ignore Distortion skips this, with the tradeoff being the texturing possibly not matching, though in most cases you probably won't notice.

Another possibility is to write individual trees/shrubs out to MXS format, and then using MXS references to place them in the model, rather than inserting foliage directly into the SketchUp model. This can speed up both SketchUp (since it doesn't need to manage so many faces), and the MXS export process, sometimes dramatically.

Thanks Mr Hill

Yes I've been trying to separate out the vegetation and save out as separate MXS - again no joy, so I'd come to the conclusion that it was an issue with the veg models as. they. will. just. not. export (as anything) tried .obj, .3ds etc but no joy - I'm gonna try the ignore distortion thing next.

Interestingly- they are some old xfrog models - and trying to import the xfrog .obj into Studio, crashes out Studio but when imported via C4d first then goes in OK (sans textures)

I had no slowdown within Sketchup manipulating the scene (as long as shadows are off)

Thanks for your help

You beauty! Ignore Distortion.

Ta very much.

just a quick question on the ignore distortion option - is it likely to remove any alpha info from the original texture - the reason I ask is that the rendered version basically shows the 'angled green cards' look of the leafs (no alpha)- (it all displays absolutely fine in SU) or is it possible the original leaf texture is say a texture of 3 leafs and each leaf is showing a particular UV set for that leaf - therefore the 'ignore distortion' is basically flattening that all out?

It's not that it would remove alpha, but (as you surmise) the original undistorted texture may not map to the geometry close enough to acceptably work. It just depends on how the model and textures were created; sometimes only a slight amount of distortion has been applied, so we get away with ignoring it, but unfortunately, it sometimes does matter.

Weird, must have been a screwy model - re-imported the .obj , set ignore distortion and sent to Studio - no probs this time.

cheers