[JDHill]

Hi Cary,

A couple of tricks you might be looking for:

1. Scene Manager > Plug-in Options > Display Options > Dockable Scene Manager...set this to 'No'
2. render resolution is only linked to the viewport size when the Camera in question is set to 'Viewport' Size Mode (under Image Output). If you set it to any other mode, or set a custom film size, it will no longer be affected by the viewport size. Furthermore, if you look in the Camera toolbar, and 'Toggle Camera Heads-up Display' on, you can accurately frame your images without worrying about the actual size of the viewport.

Let me know if these suggestions help take care of the issue.

Cheers,

JD

[caryjames]

I will try that straight away and see how it goes. That dockable viewport was driving me nuts .

I will try the camera heads up display but to be honest after one of my threads about keeping the jewellery in focus I now always use the Render Blow Up tab.

Thanks again!
Cary

[bjorn.syse]

Hi,

With the amount of ever new versions of this plugin (more than 6 over a year?) , It would be so nice with an automatic updater that not only tells me there is a new version available, but downloads it, installs it and restarts rhino. It's always a bit of a pain, when a new version comes out, for our computer classroom with over 20 computers.

cheers,

- Björn

[Polyxo]

Hi Björn,
we are in the same position. I guess that would not work - at least not in our case. Software installation requires Admin rights which would mean that had to sit down in front of each machine again. Can't imagine that that would be greatly different in your lab.
Apart from that I personally prefer having control about things going on...

Holger

[JDHill]

Hi Björn,

For technical reasons, I wouldn't expect to see this capability. As far as updating your student's machines, I would just recommend that you don't do that until the plugin notifies you of the update. Thus far, 1.7 is a customers-only release, so I haven't yet updated the version info on the server that the plugin is checking. I will probably compile a 1.7.1 for the public release to fix a couple of the small issues found so far.

JD

[bjorn.syse]

Oh, I see. Well, not a big deal.

cheers,

- Björn

[jespi]

Hi JD,

After a long time testing rhino, I've decided to switch from 3dsmax to rhino. First thing I must say is that rhino-maxwell plugin is great and well designed.
One feature I miss coming from 3dsmax is the scene scale factor. I allways model in meters in real scale, but being an architecture's student, l prefer in the first stage of the design process make the render as scale model, meaning that I light my scene only with planes and also I like to have that pronunced deep of field effect. When rendering in real scale that is not possible because emitter and cameras are out of scale. In 3dsmax plugin there is a scale factor that make me able to multiply the scene by 0.01 and that way i have control of the emitter strength and camera as I was built my building in centimeters instead of meters.


Hope that makes sense and thanks for your support.


José

[JDHill]

Hi José,

I see what you mean, but I think it would probably be better to leave this functionality in the place where it already exists: by setting the drawing units in Rhino. Try this out:

- hold down CTRL, then drag a toolbar button to make a copy
- hold down SHIFT, left-click the copy to edit the new button
- set Tooltips > Left to: 'Switch to Centimeters'
- set Tooltips > Right to: 'Switch to Meters'
- enter this macro into the 'Left mouse button command':

Code: Select all

noecho
-documentproperties
units
unitsystem=centimeter
no
enter
enter

- enter this macro into the 'Right mouse button command':

Code: Select all

noecho
-documentproperties
units
unitsystem=meter
no
enter
enter

- edit the button's bitmap (if you wish)
- click OK

Clicking with the left mouse-button will switch the drawing scale to centimeters, so everything you have drawn as 1 meter will now be 1 centimeter, and vice-versa for the right-click.

Let me know if this works all right - I'd rather not make it so that a person has two places to do the same thing.

JD

[jespi]

Wouw, that is perfect!. Thanks so much for your help.


José

[JDHill]

No problem.

[hyltom]

In another thread, Thomas mentioned that it's very difficult to add some wish for the rhino plug-in as Jeremy make a fantastic job and always surprised us with some very good new features. But since few days i' m thinking about something that could be useful for some of us.
-In rhino we have the possibility to make some region render but could it be possible to have some multi-region render implemented.
-And even better, could it be possible to add a multi-region noise improvement. This feature will work like a resume render but will update only the area we have previously selected. This could be very useful to improve some noisy area of a render.

[JDHill]

Thanks for the suggestion Hyltom, but that is outside the capability of Maxwell, so there is not anything the plugin can do to implement it. The best workaround I can think of at the moment would be to render some different regions, either with region render or by using the plugin's 'pick film-size rectangle' command, then compositing the images together.

[JDHill]

Hi JD,

i was wondering if there could be an option to automatically count standard image file format (.png,.jpg....) in sync with the mxs/mxi name.
Just like the option "always write mxi", but without actually always writing, but always counting +1.

the situation is the following:

when quitting a render (terminate mxcl) or when rendering to mxs and using coop mode over network writing images to the same folder, things come out of order. so i end up with scene_42.mxs/.mxi correspond to something like scene_36.png

-makes it almost impossible to trace back what belongs together.

i tried to manually correct the filename to the current number, but on the next autonamed render it jumps back to the first consequent number.

an option to simply use the mxi/mxs number for the images would be great!

thanks,
p

Sounds good. What I did in the new Cinema plugin is to base this only on MXS name, where you have a preference that can be set to one of the following:

1. prompt
2. overwrite
3. auto-name

That plugin does not allow image/MXI names to be different than the MXS name, so auto-naming automatically applies to all three. I think it's a simpler system, and I want to bring it over to this plugin.

[hyltom]

Could it be possible to copy one or more layers from a material to another material?

[polynurb]

you can do it already via the database manager.

if you open it up, there are little icons at the bottom, indicating different categories. click on "B" for BSDF, create a new volume (yellow button almost top right) - now you can drag any BSDF layer in there and from there drag it back into any new material... this also works for SSS layers etc. but you'll need a seperate volume for these.

..that's my cheap quick and incomplete explaination of the database manager...

...JD will do better...