[Nils2005]

Hmm, I installed the 1.1 update as well as put the maxwell.dlr plugin in the
plugin folder of 3ds max. it works, i can render and all, but whenever i open
a scene (old or new) i get a dialogue saying maxwell.dlr is missing and it
lists something about the older maxwell materials: diffuse and plastic.

anyone else experienced this?

greetings,
Nils

[tom]

Hi Nils2005,

You need to clean your scenes up from old material definitions and re-save.

Best regards,
Tom

[Nils2005]

Thanks Tom, I'll get right to it

cheers
Nils

[carlos@cmarquitectura.com]

Tom esto pasa nada mas abrir el MAX8. sin cargar ninguna escena.

[KRZ]

i just opened a old scene and suffer from the same problem.
i have allmost 500 different xref-objects in that scene with up to 10submats per object. to open the scene i have to clickaway around 100 times to get around that error-message.

i wanted to use your tip tom and started to open my xref-objects one by one and tryed to kickout the old dirt. but im not successfull with it:

i opened every material and rerendered preview...then saved the material.
-> still object opens with error-message.
i assigned a different render and reassigned maxwell
-> still object opens with error-message.

is it necessary to remake all the materials? isnt resaving them enought?
what else did i miss?

my scene crashes while generating the mxs-file so i need to sortout any problems and the most obvious one is this error-message while loading the scene.

tom do you know more about it?

[Nils2005]

no no, in the 3ds max material editor there will be slots saying "missing material". those you have to change to something you wont use like a standard material (3ds max) or replace them by mxm material that you can use.

there shouldnt be any references to the old maxwell materials in the 3ds max material editor, otherwise you ll get the error.

hope this helps
Nils

[KRZ]

it worked that way with most of my objects but two simply refused to get rid of that error. i had to export them (as fbx) and reimport into a new scene:(

[fuso]

Reading all this makes me feel really sick to be honest. Why is that we
have to go through all this?

Would it have been such a big deal to keep at least the basics in the
MAX/VIZ plug-in. Even just for the sake of rebuilding old scenes in a more
controlled and easier way! Now I have to rebuild every single MAX scene I
want to re-render with v1.1? What a nightmare!

In most cases I don't have the exported mxs scenes any more and god
knows what materials I had assigned. This is definetly not the fast
workflow anymore I was used to. Can you guys bring the old plug-in
structure back? PLEASE!!! I'm sure I'm not the only one around here.

J

[j_man]

Would it have been such a big deal to keep at least the basics in the
MAX/VIZ plug-in...

but the basics don't work anymore! why leave them in there so people can try and use them and then ask why they don't work. I havn't used them since MXM have been fixed anyway.

J.

[j_man]

I don't know if this will help but this script will select all objects in a scene that have missing materials assigned to them. It also stores all of the missing materials in an array, so if you want it to do something else with them just ask...

J.

Code: Select all

-- find objects that have missing materials.

fn testmat mt=
(
	for m in mt do 
	(
		case (classof m) of
		(
			Multimaterial	:	testmat m
			Missing_Mtl		:	append missingmats m
		)
	)
	return missingmats
)
global missingmats=#()

mat=scenematerials
testmat mat

obj=#()
for o in objects do if (finditem missingmats o.material)!=0 then append obj o
select obj

[Xlars]

I don't know if this will help but this script will select all objects in a scene that have missing materials assigned to them. It also stores all of the missing materials in an array, so if you want it to do something else with them just ask...

J.

Thanks J, works fine here ..

What would be cool was to get some way to convert materials from old Maxwell beta scenes to the new materials - ie. some sort of autoconverter that created the MXM files and filled in values and pointers to bitmaps based on the old definitions but converted to the new standards (something like the material wizards do - but with old materials as starting point instead of having to set it all up again).

Since the new maxwell.dlr misses definitions for the old material types I guess this is impossible .. hmm

Maybe it could be done somehow using the newly released SDK, if that still has support for the old material types.

[j_man]

yes definitely an SDK job for a programmer. I'm a script monkey so if you want anything scripted let me know! I'll have to leave it to the pimply nerds!

Although, I still want more MXS access to maxwell.

J.

[fuso]

Actually I get this missing .dll warning by simply opening MAX. Has anyone
else experienced this as well?

[j_man]

you should only get this when you open a scene containing the old materials.
Are you using a maxstart max scene to start max with custom maxwell materials in the material editor, or with maxwell as your renderer? if so then re-create this scene. Only thing I can think of!

J.

[fuso]

Thanks j_man,

I'll try that but be honest I think I'm going back to v1.0 here in the office...
Everyone is quite pissed off with the fact I have to spend so much time on
recreating old scenes and rebuilding materials.

Fair enough since I start missing my deadlines! What a shame...

Thanks again,

J