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When I bought maxwell a number of months ago. I was totally bowled over by the gallery, the features and the price, but I bought it mainly because an AutoCAD plugin was scheduled. This post is NOT a complaint about the absence of that plugin, I know from looking at the polls that it's probably pretty low on the list of priorities, and I know what I bought into. What I'm a little unclear on is the nature of the GUI.

I didn't really give it much thought at the time of purchase, I just wanted to work with this wonderful renderer. Without a clear definition on the site, I guess I just assumed that the promised GUI would fill the gap for any unsupported applications. That it would allow importing of models/scenes, creation and mapping of materials and camera setup. From reading the forum, I don't think I'm the only one who made this assumption.

After reading part of a recent buffos thread (all 50 pages of it ) I'm beginning to doubt that this is the case. It was implied by one of the NL team that we may already have an incomplete version of the GUI (MXI Viewer), and importing of models/mapping/camera setup was never planned as a feature. After all, I guess by definition the MXI Viewer is a Graphical User Interface for the command line application. If this is the case, I have to say I'm a little dissapointed.

The point I'm making here isn't one of complaint. I bought a groundbreaking piece of software at a very early stage of development and I accept all that comes with that. All I want to know is did I deceive myself about the GUI. Did I take what little was known and make it into more.

I'm not looking for a "set in stone" feature list, but could a member of the NL team please define generally what the GUI will and will not do.

There keeps going a lot of controversy about the GUI. One of the points that people don't want to understand is that YOU are helping us to develop Maxwell with your feedback and that the community is contributing to the development of Maxwell.

While our initial plans were to create a long list of plugins, this is still a fact, but we have discovered many people that will not get a plugin so soon, or people from unknown 3D apps that cry for using Maxwell.

The GUI today is basically a viewer, although you can alter the tone-mapping options interactively while the render is in progress. New edition features for material and lights will be added, using a 3D scene viewer.

In the last months there has been a big demand for standard object/scene import features, so we are paying attention to it.

Maxwell GUI will not be a full 3D application, you have a bunch of cool ones out there. But we understand that Maxwell must be more independent than our initial concept.

Now don't feel desperate, you can contribute!

Very good Tonfarben, the realflow interface if perfect!

Thank you for this Victor. My confidence has been restored.

This is a good GUI:

http://video.luxology.com/modo/video/in ... ayouts.mov

P.

We know

Dear buffos, I answered you many times, but if I miss an answer then I am the devil.

It must be our common mediterranean culture here..

Buffos, I am sure that you will be happy with Maxwell some day. You will be probably our best customer, our countries are near and we will drink some beers.

DELETED

How I thought the GUI would work:

- we apply all the materials and set up the cameras in the GUI*
there would have to be a uvscaling option in the material definitions.

- for the host 3D apps there will be simplified plugins that will export the scene to the Maxwell GUI, while keeping a live connection if we update or move geometry in the main app. I think this will be the most reasonable also from NL's point of view so they don't have to code any move/rotate/scale features in the GUI. I hope the plugins will be simpler to write and maintain if all that is transferred is geometry and UV info.


*there could be issues when people want to apply different materials to different faces of an object, because I think it would take a lot more time to build a robust face selection tool inside the Maxwell GUI. You would then also need to have loop, lasso, rectangular selection tools....a big mess, so why not take advantage of tools already in the host app.

So perhaps we could instead specify "dummy" materials inside our modelling apps, with a standard naming convention for example all materials starting with "mxplastic" would be automatically converted to a default plastic material when brought into the GUI for the first time.

You will be probably our best customer, our countries are near and we will drink some beers.

In separate bars

and an eagle lands on victor's arm, squirrels hop on buffos shoulders, the sky clears, bambi licks its fur and a tom jones tune starts

where did i see that........... was is Mars attacks, by tim burton?

victor wrote:We know

A little little little contribution to improve the usability of the beta's GUI... the monitor are largest than high.

P.

I know everyone is eager for this GUI to appear, and this may be a stupid question but why can't Maxwell just use the native material editor and all the existing setups of the host application? My concern isn’t really this GUI if I can use what I've got already, I would be much happier if NL would spend it's time speeding Maxwell up.

I'm not disturbed that there will be as separate GUI, I just don't see the need for it. Other render engines use the native applications material editor without any problems, why can't Maxwell? I'll admit I don't know anything about coding, but why rewrite something that already exists and works, the only thing that we really need, at least in Max, is to just be able to see the material, how hard could that be? I could see if Maxwell was a completely separate program, that had no link to the host application then it would need it's own GUI, but that's not the way that Maxwell is going to be is it?

I see what your saying, it makes since and I woulden't mind seeing that but it should definatley do things that my current material editor can't do, otherwise what's the point.

Herm... maybe I missed something in old discussions, so, i'm a bit ashamed to ask such a question...
So, what is the usage for these (R,A,Z,C) switches on the top left??