[Koryo]

First: thanks to the Next Limit team for offering a Solidworks plug-in.

Second: get the "maxwellrender.com" domain.

now the SW MR stuff.

it's very hard to evaluate the MR plug-in when the camera uncontrollable. To that point, to get through this camera less SW2005 phase, might i suggest an XYZA numerical coordinate input for the camera, focal point and focus. In fact it's not hard for a SW user to make a 3D sketch that consists of a line a plane perpendicular at one end and a point coincident to that line to define those three coordinates. such as



with just a little more complexity, camera twist and FOV could be sketched in as well. in fact i wouldn't mind making an entire 'MR Camera Part' that you move and adjust in an assembly. if of course MR would automatically extract the necessary values.

i'm not sure how the API for SW is but could MR just do a search for exclusive names of planes (such as 'MR Focal Plane') in the feature tree and apply those coordinates to the MR camera?

the reason for this solution request is that most production users of CAD software can't upgrade to a new version untill their clients do. the model migration is only up. also stability is MUCH more important than new features. so we generaly lag new releases by about a half year. therefore it would be quite a while before many SW users would be able to evaluate or use MR.

ok
i humbly suggest this menu grouping

Globals-------------menu item

^Globals........................normally open
--Render Control
----Render Time
----Sampling Level
...all variables visible (you get the point)
--Output Size
--Bounce Control

^Advanced Options.........normally closed
--MXS Export Options
--Render Layers Output
--Layers
--Tone Mapping

Render Scene..............button



Environment-------------menu item

^Environment........................normally open
--Maxwell Camera
--Sky Dome
--Physical Sky


Materials--------------menu item

^Selection......don't automaticly force the 'Selection Filter' let the user control that.
^Favorite
--material picker
--material pallets
--add/remove material--pallet picker

^Color Properties

^Optical Properties
--pull down .. Diffuse, Plastic, Metal, Dielectric, Emitter
(all the properties for the selected shader are shown)

basically it's just a MR adaptation of the SW "Color and Optics" side bar. the boardered side bar windows are cute but not very efficient. they take up lots of space. it's a pain to open and scroll them to access variables. having the all the input boxes visible is very improtant. they should also remember their open/hidden state. in fact there seems to be a permanency problem for most of the MR variables. it is VERY common to apply colors/shaders to 'Solid bodies' or an entire 'Part' and far far less common to apply to a single face.

"Recover Maxwell Material of this face" is nigh useless. this must be dynamic and saved with or within the part file. reapplying MR shaders to every feature or part is way to time consuming and makes MR unusable, but you know that.


Maxwell System Options------menu item
--System
----Scene Scale
----Threads

these variables are just in a dialogue box and PERMANENTLY saved.

Cheers,
Koryo

[juan]

Hello Koryo,

First thanks for your usefull comments and ideas.

it's very hard to evaluate the MR plug-in when the camera uncontrollable.

We know which are the limits of swmaxwell 2005. From the beggining we start to develop a plugin thinking in swmaxwell2006. The new solidworks camera provides us a lot of new improvements and let us extract geometric information like in standard 3d platforms.

the reason for this solution request is that most production users of CAD software can't upgrade to a new version untill their clients do. the model migration is only up. also stability is MUCH more important than new features. so we generaly lag new releases by about a half year. therefore it would be quite a while before many SW users would be able to evaluate or use MR.

i humbly suggest this menu grouping

Globals-------------menu item
Render Scene..............button
Environment-------------menu item
..
..

basically it's just a MR adaptation of the SW "Color and Optics" side bar. the boardered side bar windows are cute but not very efficient. they take up lots of space. it's a pain to open and scroll them to access variables. having the all the input boxes visible is very improtant. they should also remember their open/hidden state. in fact there seems to be a permanency problem for most of the MR variables.

Solidworks Api provides a lot of methods to develop a property manager (the "boardered side bar"), but not single menu dialogs. We think that the property manager had some limitations to develop a maxwell plugin, but most of them have been fixed in SolidWorks 2006. For example now you can resize it and adapting it into your screen, and the most important, you can see the new tabs. I show you a image below. This tabs allow not only redistribute the maxwell interface in a more efficient way, but also a better memory handling.

Materials--------------menu item
^Selection......
^Favorite
--material picker
..
..

it is VERY common to apply colors/shaders to 'Solid bodies' or an entire 'Part' and far far less common to apply to a single face.

We have finished a first alpha version of swmaxwell2006 version. Now we will work hard to develop the best material interface. Now we have some limitations, because solidworks has not a material editor like in other 3D platforms, but we will do our best with it. Anyway

materials assigned to solidworks entities are already saved with the file. In the next version of the plugin all maxwell parameters will be also stored with solidworks documents.

most production users of CAD software can't upgrade to a new version untill their clients do. the model migration is only up. also stability is MUCH more important than new features.

We also know that. In the next months a maxwell standalone version will be released and you will export mxs files from solidworks to this tandalone version and do a lot of things that are impossible to develop for a plugin (not only assign materials, but a lot of surprises... ). We want to develop a mxs exporter plugin for older versions of solidworks to provide a method to use maxwell in that cases.
Thanks again for your ideas.

[tom]

i'm not a SW user but thank you for your hardwork juan!

[jjs]

Great to see progress on the SW plugin.

I agree with all Koryo says and would emphasis that the main headache with PW is the management of Part colurs,materials and textures within an assembly and then changing them easily. Add to this that Sw has the ability of configurations for each part and assmbly and I can see the problems just increase exponentially.

However it would be nice to set a colour(or material and texture) for a specific config or selected configs. SW already allows this and perhaps you can piggy back this - forgive me I know nothing of the programming involved - I'm just approaching it from a SW users point of view of many years expeirance. To also be able to change a custom colour,texture, material and all linked parts follow would be great - PW2 has this and it is a start in making quick changes to rendering.

The attached picture is just a dummy showing a Maxwell folder in the main Feature tree - could this be a place to store and configure the Maxwell colour,texture and material for the Part,Assembly or subassembly? Just a thought. The other Maxwell interface tab as you show can then deal with the scene settings and rendering settings. What do other SW users think?


Regards



Jonathan

[juan]

Jonathan, thanks a lot for your ideas,

All your comments are welcome. We have finished a first version of swmaxwell2006. It has no comparison with 2005, is so much better. Our efforts are now concentrated in develop the best material management. SW2006 will be launched on June and we want to have something really good in a month.