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I have these whishes for Studio and Maxwell under OSX ( I model in Modo and Sketchup for archviz)
Studio
1. imagename settings under camera parameters. Mentioned before. But here again, I have ruined some finished work by accident several times.
2. Proper selection, deleting and moving around of instances. At this moment instances once placed are only deletable by deleting the original. The instances pallet does not work properly.
3. Better ergonomics at import. I prefer a dialog to set it all instead of the several ones I need to keep clicking. I build models in Studio by importing parts. And editing these parts means lots of import actions. I also get the several dialogs on top of each other while I am typing the first one.
4. Transparent materials are not show transparent even though I set the preferences to show transparancies.
5. Instances are never shown when Studio starts up even when the preferences were set to show all instances during the last session.
6. Grouping materials. Or some kind of materials hiarchy order. I find it hard to find a material in a long list.
7. Somehow moving objects, UV's, instances and so on is hard. Often the handles are misplaced or hard to find even when centred.
8. Better sunpostion image. I find the current one unreadable within the geometry.

Maxwell
1. Set the rendered image and updates in Maxwell to fill the screen. Zooming in and out is a hassle the way it works now.
2. A render should not fail to start up. Incorrect materials should just be listed and replaced by a default material set by the user. Often a render fails because of trivial reasons. On a tight deadline its easier to live with a distant material that does not work out than a file that fails to render. This could also be optional.


I can't think of more right now,
Francois

I would have to agree with most(if not all) of francois' items

A. Selection / moving of objects is fiddly. Translation handles are difficult to reposition - often to move handle in +X position means very carefully moving mouse in -X direction and movement is jerky at best. Can we not snap to corners of meshes or something? I don't understand this behaviour properly (perhaps it's me?)
B. Instances - again this is a nightmare. Find the whole process of creating and moving these is very difficult - hard to get them to become visible most of the time, selection of them etc - I basically don't use them and clone instead due to this. Why can't instances show up in object list - perhaps indented from parent object?
C. Shortcut keys - what about being able to double click an object in the objects list to rename - or R as shortcut on OSX?? I must do this tens if not hundreds of times when I import a scene - maddening to have to use the right click menu scroll down to 'rename' etc

this is in regard to maxwell studio 1.7 on osx 10.6.2 - MXS saved out of solidworks 2010 on win7

thanks for raising this fv ! merci !

david

v2.02
A- I think it has to do with scale and focus distance in some case were its hard to move things around. But as writen, I think that NL can improve ergonomics a lot on this matter.
B-Instances can be made visable in the preferences panel. But it does not safe this setting so you have to keep going there to make the instances visable. There is an instances list but the instances don't all show up and its buggy. The offered functionality does not work. You can not delete or move an instance once its placed.
C-You can just "enter" an object in the list to rename it (PC method).

Tx for your support David. I am beginning to really like Maxwell/Studio but I wish some basic bugs and annoyances would be addressed in Studio and Maxwell under OSX. I am afraid that I will be doing needlessly repetative task for years to come.
Francois

Ne problem pas francois !

I think it's important for users to speak up in a constructive way to improve the software we love - wonderful images possible, but we need to keep pushing NL to keep improving in terms of GUI and usability. how do you find v2.0 is it much different to 1.7?? (or better??)

going to make the jump to 2 soon - just curious

best regards

david

I have ruined work on a regular basis, because I can't assign a file name to each camera, and I don't get to use maxwell every day. I forget I need to do that in Studio. makes great images though for sure.

I also have the instances preference issue. (2.0.2)

love the app, sure makes beautiful renders! Wish I could work directly with the dev team to help make some improvements. (I have many years of experience with multimedia and UI UX development)

v2 is much better. Faster too. But in case you do a lot of interiors with lots of emitters you might still find it slow.

Francois