[nik_h]

I've just downloaded the fixed v5.5 plugin and had a quick play. Some first impressions:

- All settings in the Maxwell pallete still reset to default values when you use "Edit Cone of Vision" or update a symbol library.

- Texture map issues seem to have been resolved.

Juan could you please post a change log that tells us exactly what has been fixed and what has not.

Cheers,

Nik

[j-luc daureil]

Hi Juan,

Now, you CAN take holidays... even go to ski

Thank you very much for your work!

I've tested the new plugin with formz 6.1 today.

I'm impressed by the speed! Nothing comparable with the previous version.
I love the new integration of the materials directly in the surface style pallette of Z.
My form'z takes more a Maxwell's style with these new preview
More seriously this greatly simplify the workflow.

Of course it's now possible to avoid the studio's process for a lot of settings. But, it's a very good idea to add the target application choice (Maxwell, studio and none) especially when I have to add/replace geometry in an existing scene.

I haven't finished to test the rendering of Z's shaders for use with Maxwell because I often prefer the power of Maxwell's materials. But this seems work very well. It will probably a very interesting thing for some Form'z user...
Especially the transparence mapping in form'z is nicely converted to Maxwell clipmap.

In fact, this offer to us an intermediate method to work with Maxwell.

Let's me explain: For all important materials we can set a Maxwell material and for all others we have just to set if neccesssary all these parametres: COLOR or Map, BUMP, TRANSMISSION, IOR (if transmission > 1nm), REFLEXIVITY, TRANSPARENCY and Maxwell make all...

Maxwell is really more rapid by itself and I work more simply with, so I save my precious working time. (So, i can post more often here )

Juan, you've really made a wonderful job.

Nevertheless I can suggest some little things:

It seems that the atmospheric light from a physical sky is always active even if the physical sky is not enabled. So if you want a completly dark environnement you have to date it at an night hour.

In the Surface style Parameter pallette the name of the buttons may "disturb" the user.
In place of 'Map style' it could be better to have 'FZ to MX style' and MX to FZ style" for the second.
Yes, that is, when you read 'refresh style' you may think that this button renew the preview and in fact to achieve that you have to use the 'change shape menu' under the image...

It could be nice to have a tool to verify without any rendering if all textures (for Maxwell or Z materials) are correctly loaded.
This could avoid any repetitive failure in the rendering process caused by the miss of one or several images.
We may also suggest this to Autodessys for Z style.
Finally I would like to have a buttton to apply settings in the "Maxwell render general options" without launching the rendering...

As you can see, I don't have really serious problems.

Jean-Luc

[juan]

Hi,

Thanks for the comments! We will fix the issues we are reported as soon as possible, and will try to follow your suggestions too, they are much appreciatted.

About v5.5 we have fixed some issues in the following fields:
- Mapping (in some cases UV's were not properly exported)
- Camera (now it works better when the aspect ratio is not 1 but there is still a but when the film size is different, we are working on it.
- Materials (some of the materials were not been properly exported, for instance the IOR was 1 in many cases..)

Actually we are waiting to see how many people uses each version until take a final decision about how much resources we can put in each task. v6.1 is so much powerful in absolutely all the areas so there are many things that can not be possible to develop with v5.5 (also there are issues that are out of the scope of the plugin but affect it like the reset when editing the cone of vision)
Kind regards,

Juan