[JesperW]

When a part is created and is saved with MR materials assigned to it, one would expect these materials to be used when the part is inserted into an assembly.

The usefulness of the plugin workflow is limited when I have to go through and reassign materials to all faces of a part every time I insert a new instance of it into an assembly.

(SWX 2006SP4.1, swMaxwell 0_9_1_RC)

[juan]

Hello Jesper,

It works fine in our systems, we are trying to reproduce this issue. have you got this issue applying materials to faces bodies or to the entire part?


Juan

[JesperW]

My bad. I did one test and it didn't work, so I assumed this feature was not implemented. It appears this was caused by the assembly not being saved between when I assigned materials to parts and rendered the assembly.

There are some stability issues however. In my second test now I opened a part, checked that it had Maxwell materials assigned properly, closed it, tried to render the assembly, which failed due to a bitmap that was not found. I then opened the part and activated Maxwell PM. This crashed the entire SWX session. Restart SWX, open the same part, activate Maxwell PM, and now the material settings are gone. No materials listed in the listbox.

UPDATE: In fact closing and reopening a part between using the Maxwell PM seems to crash SWX always. Each time loosing any Maxwell materials assigned in the part.

Steps to reproduce: Open an assembly. Right click on a part and open it.
Go into Maxwell PM and assign material. Save and close part. Right click to open part from assembly again. Go into Maxwell PM. Crash.

[JesperW]

Another update: Maybe I wasn't all bad after all. Some more testing reveals occations where the material assignments are NOT carried over to the assembly.

For example I have a very simple part with two bodies, both assigned to the same MXM. If I render from inside this part, the materials are OK. But in an assembly where this part is inserted the part renders as default material. If I open the assembly MXS in Studio the MXM for this part is not even loaded.

Sorry, I have no clue to offer as to why this only happends for some parts and not for others...

[juan]

Hello Jesper,

Many thanks for the reports, we will try to fix it as soon as possible.
We have noticed the following issue: If you add a material to a face of a body AFTER adding a material to the body the body material is removed but works OK if you add materials to Body AFTER adding material to faces.

do you get the same conclusions?

Thank you again,

Juan

[JesperW]

Not so funny things are going on... In the assembly in my post above, where one part refused to keep its material yesterday, the problem has moved to another part in the same assembly.

Attempt to explain, this is the structure:



The "Perko Latch" part has a single body with a MXM material assigned to that body.

The "Stern" part has 4 bodys with a MXM material assigned to them.

No materials assigned to faces.

Both the Perko and Stern parts render fine with their materials when I render from the Part window.

Yesterday the Perko part was loosing its material when I rendered from the assembly. Checking in Studio showed that the material was not included in the MXS.

Today, that part is OK. But the Stern part, which was OK yesterday, is now the one which loses its material. I've tried rebuilding and restarting and checking that everything is properly saved and all. Still refuses to include the material in the assembly.

I was able to reproduce the problem after resaving the whole assembly to a new location, so I have made that available for testing at http://www.journeyman.se/maxwell/scene.rar

Some more tests with other assemblies show similar problems, seems that there is always ONE material missing, maybe the last or first one always get lost or something???