[eezydo]

I'm quite a novice to this whole rendering-thing (only a bit of PW-experience) , so please excuse me if my question reflects a total
missunderstanding.

Considering all those SW Plug in-problems I've been reading about,
I wonder if I'd rather get used to the native MR-Interface in the first
place and transfer my SW-Models into MR.

Colleagues at my Office do this all the time into CINEMA 4D
- since rerendering of changes does'nt occur very often, the additional
effort is not really a problem.

My question : Is this possible or does MR depend on/need some sort of
"base product".
- If yes : what would be the prcedure and would I sacrifice funktionality in any way

Thanks !

Leonardo

[Eric Lagman]

This I am interested to know also. We take our SW models into cinema right now to render where I work also. We use polytrans to do this. It seems like since the SW Plugin essentialy takes the model and triangulates it for Maxwell to render that this should allow for easy import into the MW standablone from SW.

I am interested to know about updadeability of the standalone if the model in SW changes, but like you said this does not happen often in our case either. Once it is in the render phase very little changes take place to the actual geometry.

Right now the SW plugin is good except for the texturing. Texturing is basically non-existant, and this is due to the fact that SW 2006 has no texture mapping abilites for maxwell to use. The other plugs like 3ds, Maya use the softwares native texture mapping tools.

I would like to do everything in SW, but I dont see this happening until SW implements a better texturing ability. I have a feeling I will end up just importing my model into MW standalone. I dont know what will happen to the sw feature tree though once this happens. How will bodies/surfaces get managed in MW standalone for material application? Does this mean I need to go and pick every face to the imported model. It could be more tedious this way to set up your object with materials etc if it is not done properly. How NL is planning on doing this is anyones guess as they have been very quiet about how the standalone will work.

[juan]

Hi Eric and Eeyzido,

It is a bit difficult to say which will be the usual workflow of a SW user yet. It will depend on the necessities of each one. If you want to make a render without advanced texturing you can stand in SW and you will get very nice results. If you need a very accurate management of materials and textures you will open the mxs file generated with the SW plugin and you will work inside M~R standalone. Do not worry about the updateability, it will be quite easy and also we will do it as you want. We will add all the suggestions and enhancements that you need, but I assure that from the beggining it would be really easy to work with.

Also, Maxwell standalone has a very modullar internal architecture and you will able to use just one part of it with SW. We know that the SW user would prefer not to import the models to other software to render and we will implement ways to allow it. We are not going to stop the development of SW plugin to force users to use the standalone. We will improve it a lot. As you say, the only area where the SW plugin lacks is in the texture handling. We have plans to make a major update of the plugin in this area.

Regards,

Juan

P.S You will get more accurate info very soon

[mtripoli]

Just a word about SW and triangulation; remember, OpenGL works with triangles only. What you see on the screen is the OPGL "version" of the solid model. As I recall from another application, it's relatively easy to "grab" the mesh and do what you want with it. This is why it is much better to work with the "native" solid model and not have to go through a conversion process to another format.

Barem-Boyms 3D File converter saves the OPenGL mesh from SW into an obj or LWO file. The resulting mesh is a function of how you have your video settings set.

BTW; go into Tools>Option>Document Properties>Image Quality>

change the "Shaded and draft quality HLR/HLV resolution" up and down. Check the Scene Data in M~R as you do this. You'll see the lower the screen rez, the lower the number of triangles in your scene.

You can use this to keep backgrounds, emitters and such to a low poly count and keep only parts that need to be at high rez.

By "hiding" individual objects in an assembly file and doing a quick test render, you can see how many triangles are in each object.

Mike Tripoli

[eezydo]

Thanks Mike !

- very useful Information -

Leonardo