[JesperW]

Hello Kandor, first of all, don't expect too much from the current alpha version, it has plenty of limitations.

Lights are not different from any other material, just a Maxwell Emitter material. Not using any lighta and activating one of the builtin sky lights are usually good enough to start with. And faster.

Look at the videotutorials for how to assign materials, but beware of the following (These issues will go away with the next plugin release):

- You can only assign materials to one entity at a time. Selecting multiple entities and clicking assign seems to work, but it doesn't really do it.

- You can only assign materials to faces and components, not to bodies.

- Maps are tricky, basically you assign a map to a face in SW, select this face and activate a mapping channel when creating the material in the plugin. Then assign this material to the faces and components you want.

- Don't assign a RGB (diffuse or specular) to a material that has a map. That looses the map and the material will have to be recreated and reassigned.

- There is at least one major crasher (crashes entire SW application) bug in the current release, avoid using "Automatically Select Material", it seems to crash more when this is activated.

...and look forward to a much improved plugin in the near future.

/j

[juan]

As Jesper knows, a so much better version of the plugin is cooking for the next week.

Juan

[JesperW]

Kandor, I can't speak for the developers, but I would hang on for a while and let them get a version they feel comfortable releasing ready. There is a lot of development happening at the moment.

To apply a map (This is NOT well implemented at the moment, thats one of the reasons to wait and not get frustrated with the current version!!!):

Set up a custom texture folder in the SW "File Locations" options. Apply the map to your part. Select a face which has the texture. With this face selected, create a new material in swMaxwell plugin *with a map channel active*. Now switch your filter from face to part, apply the new Maxwell material to the part. DO NOT use the "Set RGB...." buttons for this material.

(Again, there is a videotutorial on this!)

The other questions I think are best asked in the main Maxwell forum, anyway I don't know. I never noticed Maintain these values does anything at all. Burn looks like the photographic effect where overexposed areas bleed into areas that are theoretically not overexposed. Makes your render have less of a CGI, more of a realistic look.

/j

[JesperW]

The SW Camera FoV is unfortunately not linked to the Maxwell Camera FoV.

Modify the Maxwell Camera Focal Length parameter (Camera > Additional Settings) until you get the same FoV.

(not very logical, I agree )

/j

[juan]

Hi,
As you know the SolidWorks camera is a new feature of SW 2006 version. It is a big step but not all the parameters are full supported in the APIyet and it forces the user to rewrite it in the Maxwell Property manager. All this things will be improved in next versions.

Regards,

Juan