[juan]

Hello Jamie,

1. Have you textures applyed to any object of your scene? Try disabling this textures and tell us if the mxs is written fine.

2. Try hiding objects (in the objects palette or in the layers one) and press render, perhaps there is an object in your scene with corrupt geometry and it causes the plugin can not write the mxs file. We are developing methods to make the plugin stronger in this cases and we will release an update soon.

Best regards,

Juan

[Guest]

Hya,
I guess i should have mentioned that in addition to reading the other suggestions you had previously come up with, i was lastly in desperation starting a new file, no lights, trying to render a basic cube. 6 sides. no texture maps. nuthin.

Perhaps i'm not fully installed correctly? i do have the standalone app installed, but perhaps a different version from the currrent plugin?

let me know the version pairs if this is so.

thanks
jamie

[juan]

Jamie,

It do not seems a problem with the standalone app, but with the plugin.
The maxwell plugin is compounded by two plugins: MaxwellZ (the main palette) and Maxwell Attributes.

- First of all we need to know if you have properly installed both. Just unzip the file maxwellz.zip in the folder "plugins" of the formZ application folder and you will see the maxwell main palette qhen you run formz 5.5, do you see it, don`t you?

- Also when you displaly the formZ query attributes dialog you have to see the custom attribute named "maxwell materials" where you assing the maxwell materials to the objects. do you see it also?

So I guess you see the two previous menus. So If you just draw a 3D cube and you click "render scene" in the maxwell menu palette, what happens? do you get an error? a crash? select a new path for the mxs file (clicking the output mxs path button) assure you do not have other mxs file with the same name in the same path to be sure that the mxs is generated in this moment, is it generated when you click render? If it is not generated, search a file named maxwellz.txt in your root folder ( usually c:\ ), open it and let me know which is the last line of this file.

We have test it in a lot of computers and we have not get your issue. Check you have the latest version of the plugin (download it from the download section of ourwebsite. ) Please tell me any issue.

Regards,

Juan

[juan]

after hitting 'render', after about 5 seconds, the 2 windows come up, a terminal with the error, and a grey info pallette with version/registration info... no crashes, though.

Hello Jamie,
I understand that when you click render button, there are no crashes in formZ, the mxs file is written properly, and mxcl (maxwell main app) is launched fine, but then it says the mxs is not valid.
So in your screen you see two windows, the maxwell app and a command line (also named terminal window). Could you tell me which warnings appear in each window? Pay specially attention to the messages of the command line window. May be you have an issue with the image and mxs paths, please try selecting a very simple path like c:\renders

there are no maxwell.txt files on this machine either. anything else i could send you to help diagnose?

The name of the file is maxwellz.txt and usually it is placed in c:\ . But this file is generated only if there is something wrong when the plugin analyces your scene, and it seems this is not your case.

Please tell me any issue,

Regards,

Juan

[Guest]

sooooo...
i just reinstalled the maxwell render software again.... it was an earlier version than what you have posted now... sorry about the mess, but it seems to be working now.
thanks for your help.
jamie

[juan]

I am glad it works now! but anyway post any issue you have.
btw, why some of your post are signed as "jamie" and some as "guest"? perhaps there's some problem with your account..

Best,

Juan