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I should know this but I don't so how do you simulate an overcast day? I've tried turning off Sunlight but the physical sky is to blue. I'm trying not to have such a hard shadow.

Turn off sunlight and use a large emitter plane maybe

won't that increase render times?

probably, why not instead of using physical sky, encase your scene in a low poly dome and use an mxi texture through the emitter shader ?
that will give you soft shadows and a nice realistic atmosphere.

Edit: if thew emitter plane is one poly i don't think it will do that much to render time.

sorry, what is an MXI texture?

it's maxwells version of hdr images, which is used through the emitter shader to illuminate the scene as hdri's can be used in other renderers.

The mxi viewer found in your maxwell root directory can be used to load and convert images ( including hdri's ) to mxi textures for use with the emitter shader.

Encase your scene in a dome, invert normals to face inwards and apply the emitter shader ( with mxi texture loaded ). add a uv map to the object and set the mxi texture to env' spherical. Move the spherical gizmo for the object uv mapping down so the centres align.

this should get you started with mxi environments.

Wow I can't beleave I didn't know that, I'll give it a try. Thanks

A simple dull maxwell skydome might do the work for you. Then with PP you can add what ever sky you want.

Mxi is maybe the best way ...but need some time to set it up correctly...

cy,
Andronikos

come on, mxi is soooooo simple to use and very easy to setup, and the results are much better that skydome imho.

Ok when I'm converting the image to a MXI texture I can save it out in a MXI format but when I do that and I try to load it under MXI testure it won't let me?

philipbruton wrote:come on, mxi is soooooo simple to use and very easy to setup, and the results are much better that skydome imho.

ok ok... don't kill me Philip. I do not know how experience Maxer is.

hehe...

sorry i'll let you go, this time !

sorry maxer are you sure ? the mxi file if saved correctly should be pretty big in comparison to the one used to create it.

What software package do you use ?

I'm using Max 7, and I can see the MXI file I created but when I got to load it that file type is not one that it will recognize.

Dont use bitmap shader to load it, use mxi texture to load it.
It should be in your menu of shader types to use.

Sorry i should have made that clearer from the beginning