[b-kandor]

Thanks Juan! I look forward to trying it out.

Kandor

[superbad]

Thanks for the quick action (I hope it works of course ).

[Mike Scola]

Wow! What an improvement.

Installation was smooth and it looks like its running without crashing my system, so far Addin works without having to unload and reload the files and the interface is magnittudes better. Thanks Juan.

A few notes:

It would be nice to have tabs along the top of the task pane with access to the render settings, camera settings, etc.

As mentioned in previous posts, texturing/ mapping is a must have feature in the future. Keep us posted as to any developments on this.

Access to network rendering through the plugin would be nice as well, But for now I'm happy with the functionality.

It seems like my benchmark numbers have increased. I'm not sure if it's because of performance improvements or my file setup.

Keep up the good.

[xenophya]

Hello Juan and all

(sorry this is lengthy post !)

Firstly want to say well done on the new plugin - far better and way more usable. A big improvement on the previous one. Thanks Juan and NL team!!

Okay I've been testing the latest plugin and have a few thoughts and observations;

1. It would be great to get some clarification as to how the plugin interacts with SW. Is the maxwell specific information saved along with the part/assembly? (i.e. material assignment, sky, camera, render options etc?)

The current behaviour seems erratic at best (in my case), sometimes MXW info is retrieved with the SW assembly - sometimes not. IMHO this is the most important issue in making the SW plugin efficient and usable in a workflow sense. Currently I am forced to use MX-Studio which is time intensive in terms of applying materials and textures. The ideal would be that SW assembly files retain all the material information and render settings between saves and also are tolerant of updates to parts/assemblies. This would save a huge ammount of time in re-exporting MXS files and applying textures again in studio. As is stands it is almost unusable, it's only persistence and determination that keep me using SW-MXW in its current state - with the hope of improvements!. Think of an assembly of 200 parts - do you really want to navigate through the object list in studio and apply materials to 200 parts? especially when you cant rename things? manage the list, group things easily?. Not ideal. Applying materials and textures in SW directly is the best option, and I realise that there are limitations with the API and SWX codebase, but this would be fantastic.

2. Multilight - selecting this option in the render options pane does not work. Even stopping the render in MXCL and then checking 'ML' and starting the render again does still not work. I even tried entering the command in the command line field in the options pane. This is slightly annoying - only workaround is to save out MXS and open in studio and render from there (with ML on).

3. Selection - selecting solid bodies / model faces, component items in model tree exhibits strange behaviour. In SW terms selecting the soild body will normally select every face of that body. Doing this wil MXW plugin does not select every face in my exp. I have had several cases of odd material assignments due to inconsistent selection issues (or more importantly - feedback as to what material is assigned to what).

4 Normal Direction. As previously mentioned elsewhere, there is no way to check the normal direction of surfaces and/or change it. This is a royal pain for emitters. My workaround was to turn emitter planes into solid cubes to orientate the normals. This may not always be possible.

5. Texture / image paths - I have had numerous problems with texture files not being found, despite having entered the search locations in the preferences pane. loading an mxm from the browser often generates an error dialog. I have also have had many failed renders due to missing image files.

I have not unfortunately had the time yet to accurately document the exact circumstances of the above issues - but I will try to in order to assist Juan in troubleshooting these 'issues'. I would be interested to hear other SW/MXWR users thoughts/experience - all the above is merely my opinion at this point - maybe I'm not doing things right?

thanks again for the much improved update - best regards

David

[b-kandor]

The current behaviour seems erratic at best (in my case), sometimes MXW info is retrieved with the SW assembly - sometimes not. IMHO this is the most important issue in making the SW plugin efficient and usable in a workflow sense. Currently I am forced to use MX-Studio which is time intensive in terms of applying materials and textures. The ideal would be that SW assembly files retain all the material information and render settings between saves and also are tolerant of updates to parts/assemblies. This would save a huge ammount of time in re-exporting MXS files and applying textures again in studio. As is stands it is almost unusable, it's only persistence and determination that keep me using SW-MXW in its current state - with the hope of improvements!. Think of an assembly of 200 parts - do you really want to navigate through the object list in studio and apply materials to 200 parts? especially when you cant rename things? manage the list, group things easily?. Not ideal. Applying materials and textures in SW directly is the best option,

Hi Xeno,

Applying material to solidworks assemblies can be very very easy depending on how you approach it. I've been assigning materials to assemblies with over 3000 parts in a matter of minutes by taking advantage of a few tools.

In my model I try to give unique names etc. to bodies in multibody parts and to part names in general. This is important because it allows you to use 'select by name'. eg. all toolbox parts will import into studio with some unique feature in their name like HNUT or FW. So, use select by name and type fw, now all your washers are selected, so right click again and add to group called 'washers' then apply your material to that group.

I find by using this system to group parts that share materials I can very quickly sort by object list into discrete groups.

Also, once grouped, selecting a group displays all of the projectors in that group in the object properties window. You can shift select all of these projectors and once and edit them together.

Kandor


Assuming you don't need to apply material to individual faces

[juan]

Hi,

First of all many thanks for the feedback

1. It would be great to get some clarification as to how the plugin interacts with SW. Is the maxwell specific information saved along with the part/assembly? (i.e. material assignment, sky, camera, render options etc?)

Yes it is .

The current behaviour seems erratic at best (in my case), sometimes MXW info is retrieved with the SW assembly - sometimes not. IMHO this is the most important issue in making the SW plugin efficient and usable in a workflow sense.

We are trying to reproduce it here. Some users have reported that the material assignments are missed when a part or a component is opened/dropped/saved over an assembly but we could not reproduce it here. If any of you have a sequence of steps please send an email to techdesk@nextlimit.com and we will take a look inmediately.

The idea is that you use studio only if necessary, however, as you will see, Studio 1.2 has been completely rewritten and the connection will be so much better, projectors handling, selection of SW faces in studio...

2. Multilight - selecting this option in the render options pane does not work. Even stopping the render in MXCL and then checking 'ML' and starting the render again does still not work.

It is strange, are you sure you have more than one object with an emitter applied? (you need more than one object to enable multilight). Did you see the new video tutorial about multilight with SW plugin?

4 Normal Direction....

We are considering it for future updates of the plugin, the rest of the items you have reported are being tested right now....

Kind regards,

Juan

[superbad]

I am doing some rendering tonight for the first time since installing this newest patch- still get the "Pure Virtual Function" call crash. I just unloaded the 3D Connexion plugin, and that fixed it, so it seems the two plugins are not playing well together. When I get some spare time (in 2008 most likely) I will try to file an bug report with them.

Also, I have the "Launch MXCL" option unchecked, and it still launches MXCL when I select "Render Scene" from the plugin.