By Redfish-BR
#295582
Hello, I am not new to illustration work, but I am new to both Maxwell 1.7 and Sketchup Pro 7.

I am currently working on my first Maxwell Render. An interior shot. I will post some images soon.

The modeling process in sketchup is awesome. The way it manages layers in not awesome, but managable. The output of Maxwell is awesome, but the process time for rendering is not awesome.

Questions: (...and yes Richard, I did do a search on this site, but still have questions :D )

1. How do you change the uv settings for a sketchup object? (ie from a cube to sphere)

2. What is the best way to change the orientation of a material on a particular surface(s)? (ie direction of wood flooring)

3. What is the best way to scale a material. So far I am going into the Maxwell material and changing the tile size. Talk about trial and error. Is there a way to show maxwell materials in SU? Is there a gizmo add-on I can download?

4. Based on a few test renderings, my guess is that interior renderings take much longer to cook than exterior, due to the number of surface bounces, am I close on this? Due to the time involved in rendering a scene, what shortcuts can be taken as adjustments are needed? Can I re-render a window? Can I re-render just one layer? At these render times, switching out a wood floor for tile, could be the ultimate nightmare in meeting timelines.

Thanks for any help.
By numerobis
#295671
1.-3.
i use the auto-mxm function. all used mxm's have to be placed in on specific folder, which has to be defined as auto-mxm folder. create a standart sketchup material with your texture used by the mxm as dummy material (it's useful to create a lowres version of bigger textures for the dummy material to get smaller skp files and better model handling!). set a basic texture scaling in the material editor. apply the material to the model.

to avoid problems with the material conversion i recommend to assign the material only on face level not to groups or components!

there is no gizmo available in skp!

for texture alignment: right-click on the face >texture position (don't know if this is the exact term...)
now you can move/scale/rotate/mirror your texture. to get a constant alignment over all connected (or not connected) faces pick up the settings of the adjusted face using the pipette of the painting tool (alt) and apply them to all other faces (using shift, strg or shift/strg).
to align textures on curved object, you have to turn on hidden lines to make the single faces accessable. align the texture on one faces an then copy to the next face - you have to do it one by one to get it right...

for spherical mappings you can use the texture tool ruby created by whaat - you find it at the ruby forum of the skp community.

4.
you can't rerender single objects without the others to get a proper lighting. to rerender single parts use the region render function in maxwell studio! region render is not possible with the skp plugin... :cry:
By Redfish-BR
#295675
Thank you Numerobis, extremely helpful information.
Will there be a Maxwell Render 6 ?

Let's be realistic. What's left of NL is only milk[…]