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By oz42
#275745
...so, continuing my thoughts on the possibility of integrating XSI Procedural textures with Maxwell, I found myself wondering this way;

Sending information from the XSI Render Tree to Mxed?

If the previous method (http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... hp?t=28999) of sending a procedural texture to Maxwell from XSI via the use of a LightMap works (i.e. 'baking' the procedural texture into an image map) then could this method also be used to send an image bitmap to the Texture Map Icon 'slots' in Mxed and if so, could other information be sent this way as well?

With the Maxwell XSI addon any values entered into the Render Options (or MaxwellCamera attributes) get sent straight to the Render Option of mxcl at the time of render. Could the same technique be used to send information from the XSI Render Tree to the relevant sections of the mxm material in mxed?

Writing a spdl in XSI is relatively easy when you use the Shader Wizard included in XSI. I have no scripting experience and managed to create a simple spdl which reflects all the data needed for the Maxwell Displacement layer;
Image
I created the dark green node in the bottom right which has matching parameters to the Displacement layer in mxed (as shown in the floating pane). All that is needed now is a method of sending these values to the relevant section of an mxm, as is done with the XSI Render Option values being sent to the Render Option of the mxcl at the time of render.

I'm sure this is much trickier than it sounds but if the ability to send values from XSI to Maxwell exists then, theoretically, any value could be sent and you could build complex render trees in XSI (using the beautifully simple Render Tree method) and these would be resolve into mxm's at render time. I've simulated one here with MaxwellMaterial node in place of mxed's BSDF layers and Image nodes plugged into the Mix8color's weights to simulate mxed's Blending Weights, with invert node where necessary. I've plugged my Displacement node in the the Material's Displacement input but, in reality, this may need to be inserted into a specific node in the Mix8color and then the contents of the entire Mix8color node could be resolved into the various layers in the mxm?

As I say I'm not a programmer and I'm sure this is harder than it looks but I just thought I'd put the idea 'out there' to see if anyone thinks this may all be possible at some point in the (not too distant!) future?

Thanks again.
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