[yolk]

hi JD

i had a look at the 2010 beta and was so underwhelmed that i won't renew my maintenance this year.
will i be missing some cool new waxmell plug-in features (like mapping inside swx) or will the feature set be roughly the same?

thanx for your advice.

[JDHill]

There's no way I'll drop support for SW2009 for quite some time...most of what we need is in the SW2008 API, so where I currently support SW2007 and up, that should just change to a minimum of SW2008.

[yolk]

thanx alot for the fast reply

[Eric Lagman]

On a side note SW 2009 service pack 4 allows photoview 360 to use decals that are mapped on with photoworks. Since photoview is a stand alone app like maxwell studio I wonder if they opened up something in the software that would allow maxwell to do the same? Sorry to keep beating the dead horse JD Its so close to being a complete plugin if they can just do something to let you use the decal mapping system that is built in to photoworks. Just an FYI in case you were not aware of that change in Service pack 4.

[JDHill]

Sorry to keep beating the dead horse JD

No problem. Decals, while also depending on moving up the version requirements of the plugin, present a slightly different problem than the mappings talked about above - how would you create such decals in a Maxwell material? Because, the plugin has no special abilities here; it is limited in exactly the same ways as you are, and some of the restrictions we have in mxm materials, which do not apply in SW decals, make it difficult or impossible to do. Say, for example, that you make a decal that is 10mm x 10mm in size on a body that's 1000mm x 1000mm; how will you make an mxm for the entity which expresses this decal, while still giving you the rest of the material you need for the entity? And now, if there are two or more decals placed, what then? You need some additional accomodation for this in the mxm spec itself, meaning that, as people have requested on the wishlist, you need the ability to stack multiple layers on top of one another in the mxm. A plugin cannot provide you with any new capability like this on its own.