[blueplanetdesign]

We are considering undertaking the development of a 3ds max® specific plugin
for commercial availability using the soon-to-be-released Maxwell Render SDK.
The plugin would be a third-party enhancement for use with Maxwell Render.

Currently, Maxwell Render for 3ds max® offers only four cities under the physical sky
section in the Environment drop down. These cities allow the end user to replicate
the environmental / sky conditions at those particular latitude and longitude coordinates.

Our intent would be to offer a plugin that would extend the range of city selections
with full control over the Sm and Julian Day properties.

Initially, we might offer some interesting "places" like Cairo, Paris, Narsaq (Greenland),
Bangkok, among others.

In an effort to determine the commercial viability of such a for-sale product I would
welcome input and comment on whether or not such an enhancement to the
Maxwell Renderer would be of interest to you.

[Mihai]

But wouldn't such a plugin effectively just set the latitude and longitude for me, so I didn't have to do it myself? If that's all it would do, I'd prefer to do that myself without paying for and installing another plugin.

[rivoli]

as mihai said, would there be any real benefit in having such a plugin? would it be any different if i manually set longitude and latitude corrisponding to, say, bangkok instead of using your plugin as you're planning it?

[blueplanetdesign]

Seems to me the issue is one of convenience and ease of workflow.

Granted, one can dial in these specific parameters independent of a third-party plugin,
but the beauty is in the convenience afforded versus the time consuming research
required to accurately pinpoint a precise location.

When considering all the contributing factors, one eventually assesses
issues related to overall system overhead too.

If price per unit is also a consideration, let's discuss that as well.

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[intrinsia]

You may want to realize to that Maxwell, being in Alpha stage, will have lots of updates and new features written into it. I'm sure the lack of city locations was intentionally left at a small number just to give it's users a taste of what's to come down the road.

[tom]

hmm..i'm not a programmer but gina says it's pretty easy to do and i'm shure tom will do this soon in a niteshift and offer it for free..tom?

haaahha... yeah that's pretty easy when you know maxscript also but there's
a little problem: i didn't give it a try yet hahaah... furthermore, steven is
a very good friend and i won't be infront of him....hehehe... this is better..hehe

however, i don't understand why he's trying to earn money with this thing

..and the better solution is, "M~R team must do this instead"... hehehhe

for me... it's not matter if there's Cairo or Paris for now. Sun is sun...hehe

[Jason Jacobs]

Steven,

Good idea, but not worth extra money even considering convenience. I agree with Tom that sun is sun. I've never had a job where perfect sun placement relative to LAT/LONG was important. Having said that, it still would be nice to have a feature, similar to 3dsmax's Daylight System, whereby a person can either pick any spot on the globe, pick a spot and 'snap to' nearest major city, or select one of a multitude of major cities from a drop-down list which automatically fills in the LAT LONG data (similar to Maxwell, but much better). You can also rotate the 'compass helper' to pivot the North direction of the sunlight system instead of rotating the whole scene. I'm hoping that Next Limit will eventually incorporate these things into Maxwell. You should also consider that a max plugin would be useless as soon as the MW standalone is released. Now, if you can get the above mentioned features working and to market ASAP, then I would be inclined to purchase. I HATE having to rotate my whole scene just to place the lighting!

A volumetric cloud/sun generator would be nice, too, as long as it doesn't effect render times!

[ignacio]

Sorry, but I read the conversation and I have to say something. This is Ignacio from the core development team. The idea is that we are releasing the new SDK for the next week and we are planning to incloude a city list with more than 200 entries around the world, inclouding the GMT offset and the daylight offset. We are staring this week with a better and more acutare solar system model that will solve many of the problems that maxwell has now. It will incloude new things as the possibility to see the solar disk, and its diameter will increase or decrease depending if the render is in winter or summer, etc.. some other cool things.

Regards,Ignacio

[Mihai]

[tom]

Sorry, but I read the conversation and I have to say something. This is Ignacio from the core development team. The idea is that we are releasing the new SDK for the next week and we are planning to incloude a city list with more than 200 entries around the world, inclouding the GMT offset and the daylight offset. We are staring this week with a better and more acutare solar system model that will solve many of the problems that maxwell has now. It will incloude new things as the possibility to see the solar disk, and its diameter will increase or decrease depending if the render is in winter or summer, etc.. some other cool things.

Regards,Ignacio

Great news Ignacio,
I took my word "sun is sun" back A seasonal ecliptic will be cool.

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[pabl0]

very good news, Ignacio !

[Jason Jacobs]

Yes, being able to see the sun is awesome. Especially for animation like camera pans. Since we're using a real-world camera, I guess we'd get the glare and washout that occurs when a camera briefly passes by the sun?? Physically correct lens flares perhaps? A parametric setting for simulating lens imperfections, dirt, and smudges? lol. So many options available with M~W!

[jep]

Who needs a when we already have this:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/search.html