[Andreas Hopf]

Deleted (double posting)

[Mark Bell]

Personally, I don't really care if people want to avoid Substance Designer. I'm simply grateful, on this New Year, for the warm and helpful community of fellow Maxwell Render folks, and for the continual work of the devs on the Maxwell Render application. Easily my favorite rendering engine.

....../
But, I did spend three months preparing tutorials for people in the product visualization field who will need to learn Substance Designer sooner or later.
Actually, the truth is that I spent three months because I chose to work on "glass" which is the most problematic of all the possible "substances".

But, anyhow, if you guys, Mark and Andreas, want to explore this further, here are private links for you to download all the materials in the commercial product tutorial set that I made a couple of months ago. Any Maxwell Render forum fellow is welcome to these. This tutorial set and its accompanying tools was written for a much wider audience, so a bunch of this won't be particularly relevant to Maxwell Render users. You won't need the material on Autodesk Max or Maya (Arnold, Corona, Redshift, Octane rendering engines) or Thea Renderer, for example. This package deals with glass, but everything in the tutorials applies to any kind of material - metals, plastics, stone, etc.

These tutorials are aimed at absolute beginners - people who've never worked with Substance Designer. The first thing that you should take a look at, however, is the first of the "background papers." Skimming over the basics of glass as a material, you should maybe start with the small section on "why you should care about Substance Designer."

http://www.expandingwave.com/clientdown ... ncepts.zip

Two papers in the set above. One is an overview and the second deals with getting from Substance Designer into the rendering engine. As claimed above, you should start with the first paper, and then just flip through the tutorials. Don't come back to the rendering engines paper until you've completed the tutorials. (As a side note, for the rendering engines paper, I only briefly covered the limitations that Maxwell has in handling Substance Designer. I'll probably write a longer, more explicit "letter" to the Maxwell devs describing the issues here. Most of the limitations can be rather easily corrected with relatively simple code changes. But, if the current limitations seem difficult to any of you, I've already prepared a step-by-step paper on how to handle these issues. Just haven't found anything good to do with that last paper. If anyone needs a step-by-step on how to get glass into Maxwell Render, I'll set up a download to this last little paper.)

http://www.expandingwave.com/clientdown ... orials.zip

There is an overview paper describing the contents of the six tutorials - trying to give a reader some idea of what to expect. But, I stress-tested the tutorials on a couple of volunteers - they seem to get most people comfortable with Substance Designer in just a few days.

All illustrations for the tutorials and everything else were made in Maxwell Render.

http://www.expandingwave.com/clientdown ... Ibrary.zip

This is a collection of "tools" for Subtance Designer, and the key item that made this a commercial product, rather than a free tutorial set. Not needed if you are not going to actually work with Substance Designer or glass materials.

http://www.expandingwave.com/clientdown ... ibrary.zip

Completed examples of everything made in the tutorials, and then a few extras thrown in.

http://www.expandingwave.com/clientdown ... isions.zip

A bunch of people who bought the commercial product asked for information about how to convert existing glass materials that had been published by Allegorethmic/Adobe. into glasses they could actually use. So, this is just a bunch of examples of how to modify some of those materials.

So, enjoy! Any comments on the contents are very much welcome.

Hi Forester,

Thanks for putting all this together and posting it - it's really appreciated. For me it's not the cost of extra software or whether I'm able to learn and 'master it', it's the time to fit it all in. My first priority is to advance further with Maxwell, hence my time on this Forum and a willingness to learn and contribute where I can. SD seems to be another step forward so I'll add it to the list of additional software to explore. Thanks again and look forward to more of your musings and renders

[Mark Bell]

After making this one, I experimented with covering it with some plants, but quickly found the polygon count to be excessive. In fact, even the very ugly, sparse covering shown here exceeds anything anyone would want to play with.



The render I posted earlier (viewtopic.php?f=7&t=45951&p=401193#p401193 ) used Maxwell Assets (xrefs) of trees brought in to the main model file. I don't have the link handy, but came across an explanation and video from NL on using asset files and how they reduce the main file size whilst allowing "unlimited" assets to be loaded. In the above scene you could create a couple of climbers in their own file, tweak the leaves and textures etc. to how you want, then import the file as a reference/asset file and place on the walls as many instances as you want whilst keeping a low file size. The only issue I had with the forest scene in the above render I posted was Maxwell Studio displays the asset files more like a point cloud with low density so once you have a number loaded it gets hard to see what's what. There may be a way to change the display to make these imported files more visible, but the concept works well so maybe give that a go if you need the 3D object detail not yet achievable with Substance Designer?