[chrisvconley]

Great job Pavol and thanks for the update!

I am not sure I get the workflow for assigning and checking materials. One hangup is whether I should assign a color as a placeholder for the mxm I will create. I don't like using the SketchUp materials. My second hangup is that there is no "confirm" or "assign" button. How do i know when a mxm is assigned to a material?

Is this the workflow?

1. Pick a color, name it "xAluminumx"
2. Use the dropper to drop it on the geometry
3. Enable the Maxwell Material panel
4. Click on the geometry with the paint bucket
5a. Load an MXM into the slot. (Does this do it?)
5b. Pick basic Maxwell material parameters in the window. (Does this also assign the Maxwell attributes to the color applied?
6. How do I remove the attributes?
7. When I click on another piece of geometry with the bucket, do the current settings get applied to the SU color/material assigned to that geometry?

Thanks for any clarifications!

Chris

[fv]

It took me a while as well.

The big difference is that any SU color can have Maxwell attributes. So once you have set the material panel for a SU color you can use that color as you like same way as always in SU. Want to change the Maxwell attributes just pick the color with command bucket (mac) and the panel appears to be edited.

Since I just convert SU colors on export I don't really use this feature much but I do understand now that you can actually connect any mxm material to a SU color by using the material panel. This might be easier than naming the SU colors according to mxm materials.

Be careful with the activating seperate groups. Only do this when you don't assign colors to seperate faces otherwise you might end up with many more objects in Studio then you can handle.

I like the new plugin and it seems to works well. Thanks Pavol. Big improvement and it looks I am hanging on to Maxwell because of it.

[Richard]

FV

mate can you expand on the issue with groups, I haven't played yet with the new plugin - Is the multiple object issue created with the last plugin still an issue???

[fv]

with groups its a bit hard to explain. try it out with a few blocks in SU. You can assign SU colors to groups as well as all the seperate faces. If you assign only by group you can have each seperate group with the same material import into Studio as a seperate object regardless if the material is used as well in an other object. If you assign faces all faces will import in Studio as separate groups. Thats not handy.

For instance you can assign one emitter color to two different groups and export to Studio. In studio you will find the two groups as objects seperated although they are using the same material. Handy if you want to hide one group for different renderings switching groups on and off.

Object and materials import in Studio fine now, no longer the duplicated materials and explosion of objects.

The new plugin is a must install for Maxwell/SU users.

[Sheik]

The reason why the ”separate groups” is there is that you can now export several emitters, but so that the assigned power isn’t divided between all geometry that uses the same emitter material. When you make copies of a grouped emitter with “separate groups” active, they will all export as separate objects, but with one material, and there is no need for multiplying the power with the number of individual emitters.
Sheik

[pelias]

mate can you expand on the issue with groups, I haven't played yet with the new plugin - Is the multiple object issue created with the last plugin still an issue???

I believe this was already answer but it is an important point so I will reiterate it here. The main issue you should keep in mind when using "separate groups" is that this "separation" works based on SU material. Now there are different ways to assign material when you are dealing with groups/components - you can assign material to individual faces and group afterwards. Or you can groups faces and assign material to a whole group. In the first case the material is assigned to face - thus separate will create a new Maxwell object for every face (typically now what you want). In the second case the material is assigned to a group/component. That means the plugin will create keep faces in a group connected together (in a single Maxwell object) but if you have multiple copies of the group those groups will be separate into separate Maxwell objects.

I am not sure whether you are still with me after this explanation but the easiest thing to do is to make sure you assign the material AFTER you create a group/component. This is what you want in most cases...

And to answer the original question - the problem of "multiple object" or "object explosion" was fixed so you should no longer experience that...

Pavol