[zparrish]

I was going to post this in the 3ds Max plugin section, but then I realized that this would be a cool feature for any of the 3D editor plugins. I'll be describing it in 3ds Max terms, but I'm sure everyone will understand the basic idea.

I've had major frustrations in the past with trying to associate custom alpha channels through an object's properties and then expecting that instancing that object will retain those properties. They just don't carry through to the instances, and changing values of an instance after the fact doesn't affect the other instances. That's not a Maxwell specific issue. As far as I know, none of the object properties carry over through instances, just the information in the modifier stack. I realize that this problem is completely on my end as the end user of the editor (3ds Max in this case). None the less, it's still pretty frustrating to come in the next day, check my MXI rendered files, and discover that my alpha channel settings only worked for a single object.

With the ability to allocate custom alpha channels by material, I think it would be useful for the MaxwellRefMaterial to create an override section for the material's Global Properties. This would let you use a reference material while also configuring scene specific, custom attributes (the best of both worlds). So as not to disturb the Maxwell engine itself, an option like this would probably require that the "Embed Material in Scene" be forced, that way the material definition would be encoded in the ".mxs" file and remain as native to Maxwell as possible.

This could actually be really useful for more than just alpha channels. The ability to override any and all of the Global Properties for a material on a scene to scene basis would be incredibly useful:

http://support.nextlimit.com/display/mx ... Properties

The only one I can see that would be overridden the least (and possibly never at all) is the "Global Bump" input. If you're using a "Global Bump" on a materials, it's because that specific material needs to look a specific way and you'll probably have no need to override it. Who knows though, perhaps someone will think up a really cool workflow or technique that does capitalize on that specific option.

Thanks Next Limit!

[zparrish]

I just ran into a situation where this would be useful for toggling the global "Shadow" parameter for a material. There doesn't appear to be much community interest in this suggestion since it hasn't gotten any feedback since March.

From a development stand point (Next Limit's perspective), does this sound like a reasonable and useful suggestion? Is it difficult to implement this or can you guys see a potential workflow conflict? There may be an underlying factor I'm not seeing that makes this a poor suggestion. I won't really know until we can generate some discussion about it though.

Thanks Next Limit and forum members!

[Mihai]

This sounds like a perfect tool to create using the Python SDK for Maxwell. I think in general it would be useful to create a python "toolbox" for Maxwell with a lot of these kinds of functionalities added to it with time.

- extract certain channels from a sequence (without going through Maxwell.exe)
- extract lights
- change an MXS ref with another
- override material settings for a certain material
- override object properties
- ........
- ........