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I'm thinking of purchasing their book models for use in in-situ/lifestyle product renders. http://www.modelplusmodel.com/volumes/vol.06-books.html

Does anyone have any experience of using these with Maxwell Studio? I'm concerned that I won't be able to import all the textures with the model as there isn't a specific plugin for Maxwell. These are the formats it comes with:

*.max Scanline - with Standard materials for 3ds max 2008 or higher
*.max V-Ray - with materials for V-ray 1.5 or higher (LWF compatible)
*.max Mental Ray - with A&D materials for Mental Ray or Iray
*.fbx - with mapping without materials
*.obj - with mapping without materials

This should be fine, since there exist tools to convert V-Ray mats to Maxwell mats. Even if something goes slightly awry, the book materials should be so simple, I can't imagine this going horrifically belly-up. Plus the UV mapping of the books is already embedded and straightforward.

They have a downloadable sample, did you try that out?

I actually went ahead and purchased one of the sets of books (at $30 it was worth trying). The .obj files just bring in the models and no textures. Can you point me to the vray conversion tool? It sounds like this is what I need to get the textures associated to the models.

Thanks!

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scrip ... ter-v0-98b
That's one but it's a bit outdated, may still work though.

There was another floating around called GTools but that seems to be abandoned.

If you can get the books to convert to standard 3DSMax materials, isn't Maxwell set up to convert those to MW materials? Sort of a lengthy process but it could work...

Nuclear option: separate V-Ray pass of just the books?

Hello Cloudman,

The Maxwell plugin for Max can translate standard Max materials (phong and blinn) into Maxwell materials during the exportation (transparent to the user) so they can be rendered with Maxwell.

Although that translation is not 100% perfect, and can not consider all cases, there should be no problem to render those book directly from 3DSMax to Maxwell (without the need to convert vray materials, etc).

Sophisticated effects including multilayers, varnish ink, etc won't be automatically translated, but it can work.

Let us know the result of your tests.

Cheers!

Dario Lanza

Thanks for this. Do I need a copy of Max to do this or just the plugin?

dariolanza wrote:Hello Cloudman,

The Maxwell plugin for Max can translate standard Max materials (phong and blinn) into Maxwell materials during the exportation (transparent to the user) so they can be rendered with Maxwell.

Although that translation is not 100% perfect, and can not consider all cases, there should be no problem to render those book directly from 3DSMax to Maxwell (without the need to convert vray materials, etc).

Sophisticated effects including multilayers, varnish ink, etc won't be automatically translated, but it can work.

Let us know the result of your tests.

Cheers!

Dario Lanza

As I can see, those models come in Max format (textured). So in order to use it, you will need to have Max installed.

The other universal formats they provide (fmx and obj) they don't provide the objects with textures, you could import them into Studio, but I guess that you would have to map them manually. So they are forcing you to use Max.

But I guess that with Max, you will be able to open the models (in Max format, so textured) and export them to MXS format without any problem, to be used in Studio.

Let us know what do you get.

Cheers

Dario Lanza

Normally with UV mapped stuff, its easy to open the obj, then look for the corresponding map and stick it on. Tweak a nice mxm, then clone it and drag new maps into each cloned mxm, and stick them on the corresponding books... sorry longwinded and maybe stating the obvious.. but maybe helpful

Thanks for the suggestions. I've installed the test version of Max and the Maxwell plugin. I've exported the scene but when I look at the file it's exported 100 animation files. I'm a complete novice with Max....how do I export the books only as one file? Sorry for the "idiot" question

i don't know what's going on there, but i think the fastest/easiest way would be to select the object and then export only the selection as mxs.
(using the scanline version of the books)

- Application menu (the max symbol) > Export > Export selected

I've just had this response from Model+Model as I couldn't get the textures associated with the Maxwell file. They including a screen grabbed video of the whole process. Fantatstic customer support!

BTW, I helped them out with the last bit. Just needed to change the display to textured decal.


Hi Jeremy,

Texture paths in *.max file are stripped. If you look to Bitmap Parameters you will see that any path have only the texture name, but not the absolute path to it, see screenshot_01.jpg. 3ds Max can find textures by this name, but Maxwell seems need absolute pathes, so they should look something like D:\textures\mpm_vol.06_p02_01_diff.jpg. To change paths to absolute you may use Bitmap/Photometric Paths utilities and after that export the scene. See video in attachment. The one thing I don't understand how to make textures visible in Maxwell Studio viewport.