[juan]

Hi Jonathan,

Here again

Juan I think your new feature for changing SW material colour using to match the Maxwell colour can have unexpected consequances. It by mistake clicked a face with my picture and it went grey and I had to go to the SW Assembly and reset the Texture picture.

Yes, I have noticed this issue. This is not a bug of the plugin. When the color of an entity is changed though the api, the texture is hidden, not deleted, and if you want to see it again, you need to reopen the SW texture property manager.. I think it is not impossible to fix automatically. We will investigate it next week. Anyway perhaps it is better than this new feature is by default disabled, it depends on your suggestions.

Pehaps an alternative is something similar to the 'Show material Automatically' but in the reverse direction. Click on the material name in the list and the Part(s) automatically highlight in the SW highlight colour.

I have thought about it many times. It could be a bit expensive for the computer performance, but there could be ways to do it. Let me check it. Again, thank a lot for your comments

Juan

[jjs]

Welcom back Juan - That was a short holiday !! ?? I was expecting you to be away for at least 2 weeks.

I hope you had a good time and did not think of work!!

I am slowly bedding down sw2006 - It has a habit on my system of just dropping out especially when saving - please note this is not when I am using maxwell, so I think my computer is not the best for testing the stability of maxwell in SW unless it is repeatable on someone elses system. a repeatable crash I have but is not probably a very usuall set of circumstances is - Open SW and then before opening a part or assembly, click on the Maxwell menu along the top of the SW window - my SW always crashes. As I say this is not a very common circumstance - as who would open maxwell when no SW part or assembly is open and with no SW part or assembly , no file is lost in the crash!!, but nevertherless it does crash SW.

Using all the videos I think I have a handle on the way to use the features in the SW plugin - However I try some features and not much happens. Are all the features show enabled - if not could they be greyed out until implemented.

Attached is a pic of the features I don't quite understand.

http://rapidshare.de/files/3939626/Juan_-_Q1.jpg.html


I'll post a seperate thread of suggestions for others to comment on so that you can guage which way you would like to implement the improvements in SW.

TTFN

Jonathan

[juan]

That was a short holiday !! ?? ...
I hope you had a good time and did not think of work!!

mmm....

Open SW and then before opening a part or assembly, click on the Maxwell menu along the top of the SW window - my SW always crashes. As I say this is not a very common circumstance -

That is not a very common circumstance indeed, but it is a bug anyway and it should be fixed as soon as posible. In the next update you will not have this crash.

Using all the videos I think I have a handle on the way to use the features in the SW plugin - However I try some features and not much happens. Are all the features show enabled - if not could they be greyed out until implemented.

All the features are implemented (although some of them have some bugs, not in swmaxwell plugin but in the maxwell app). The check boxes of your image are needed to activate texture channels. When you apply a texture in solidworks, if you want to render this texture inside maxwell, you need to create a maxwell material with one or more texture channel enabled (diffuse, bump, glossy..) and apply this material to the entity which has applyed the texture. If you just enable the diffuse channel, maxwell will render it like you see in solidworks. If you enable the bump channel instead, maxwell will use this texture as a bump map. The glossy, opacity...etc maps.. work in the same way. Notice that some of this maps need a strenght value (the numeric control next to each check box). For example do that test: apply a chess board texture (it is included in the SW textures, in the patterns menu) to one part and create a maxwell material with the diffuse chanel enabled. Apply this material to the part and render it, you will see the texture rendered in maxwell. Now create another material with the bump chanel enabled instead the diffuse channel. Set the numeric field next to the bump checkbox to 1000 and apply this material to the part. Then render it, you can see that the texture is not rendered in the normal way, but now maxwell uses it as a bump map. You can see a single example in the videotutorials, I will do more videos in the next weeks to help you get the best with maxwell.

[jjs]

I think I understand.

I'll give it a go.

Juan - Working on Sunday ?

TTFN

Jonathan